January 2012 – Page 8 – Mindfulbalance

Today, Notice what goes right

January 12, 2012January 11, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

Each of us is like a mosaic, with lots of lovely tiles, some that are basically neutral, and a few that could use a little – ah – work. It’s important to see the whole mosaic. But because of the brains negativity bias, we tend to fixate on what’s wrong with ourselves instead of what’s right. If you do twenty things in a day and nineteen go fine, what’s the one you think about? Probably the one that didn’t go so well.

Your brain builds new structures based on what you pay attention to. Focusing on the “bad” tiles in the mosaic that is you keeps feeding an underlying sense of being mediocre, flawed or less than others. And it blocks the development of the confidence and self-worth that comes from recognizing the good tiles. These results of the negativity bias are not fair. But they’re a big reason why most of us have feelings of inadequacy or self-doubt.

Rick Hanson, Just One Thing

Being stuck in the past

January 11, 2012January 12, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Whenever the disempowering lens of history falls over our eyes, the present reality is subverted to the dynamics of the past, and one remains a prisoner….once again. Learning to find ones own truth, hold to it, and negotiate with others seems easy enough on paper. In practice, it means catching reflexive patterns while they occur, suffering the anxiety caused by living more consciously, and tolerating the assault of anxiety-driven “guilt” afterwards. (This guilt is not genuine; it is a form of anxiety aroused by the anticipated negative reaction of the other person). Such reactions for the child were enormously distressing and are still debilitating for the adult. Over the years we tend to believe that this old familiar system is who we really are, and, by and large, such a system so frequently presented to the world becomes how the world sees us, Being nice has, however, ceased being nice.

James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

Noticing when we are bothered today

January 11, 2012January 11, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

An interesting reflection by Ajahn Chah on the way we let things get under our skin and bother us. We often allow events to annoy us because of our fixed idea of how things ought to be, or following an ideal schedule which we have made up, and then blame reality for not following it. Most suffering is caused by our mind having a set idea of how things should be and clinging to that thought, or by repeating patterns triggerred by events in our past, rather than tuning in to how things actually are. We can see if this is the case when we get bothered today, and maybe drop the idea we have in our heads, tuning into a more direct experiencing of what is going on.

In our practice we think that noises, cars, voices sights are distractions that come and bother us when we want to be quiet. But who is bothering who? Actually we are the ones who go and bother them. The car, the sound, is just following its own nature. We bother things through some false idea that they are outside us and clean to the ideal of remaining quiet, undisturbed. Learn to see that it is not things that bother us, that we go out to bother them. See the world as a mirror. It is all a reflection of our mind. When you know this, you can grow in every moment, and every experience reveals truth and brings understanding.

Ajahn Chah, A Still Forest pool.

Staying open in our work

January 10, 2012January 10, 2012 Karl Duffy2 Comments

You must remain open to the possibilities and resist the temptation to make a closure before your life has run out. This means always keeping your very identity open-ended, because a life work defines you. Spiritual writers sometimes say that all finite loves point to an infinite love, and so there is always a yearning for more. The same could be true of a life work. Any finite task or career points to another beyond it. Your sense of what you are meant to do with your life has to remain open-ended, no matter how much or how little you feel you have accomplished. You never know fully what you are called to do.

Thomas Moore, A Life at Work

The basics of Mindfulness practice 1 : Stay in the “Now”

January 10, 2012January 10, 2012 Karl Duffy2 Comments

As a new MBSR group started last night in Geneva, I will post for the next week some texts to support anyone just starting to practice strengthening their awareness and focusing the mind, a kind of basic foundation for mindfulness. For regular readers of the blog, they will be familiar quotes by now. However, as I have said before, practice is essentially the same for everyone – starting over and over again, re-minding ourselves to be present to our lives, as the mind wanders. We are all learning and starting over each day, as we again and again find ourselves far away from the “now”:

There is no other time than now. We are not, contrary to what we think, “going” anywhere. It will never be more rich in some other moment than in this one. Although we may imagine that some future moment will be more pleasant, or less, than this one, we can’t really know. But whatever the future brings, it will not be what you expect, or what you think, and when it comes, it will be now too. It too will be a moment that can be very easily missed, just as easily missed as this one.

Jon Kabat Zinn

In our world, as it is

January 10, 2012January 10, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

To practice we must start exactly where we are. Of course, we can imagine perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everybody else should behave. But it’s not our task to create an ideal. It is our task to see how it is and to learn from the world how it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.

Ajahn Sumedho, The way it is