Month: March 2012

Some neuroscience links to practice

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I was reading recently neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s work on the development of our sense of self. I find his emphasis on the body harmonizes very well with our practice, especially with how we work with difficult emotions. We frequently carry into the present unworked material from the past,  which can be tied up with fearful emotions and inhibit our freedom. Our emphasis is on holding the emotions as they manifest in body sensations in awareness without feeling the need to fix them or judge them or push them away. This is because the body has a wisdom which is broader than the thinking, fixing part of the mind, and we can make use of the way our past manifests in the body, as it is the “pivot around which the conscious mind turns” and allow us get in touch with our primordial experience.

You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.

Eckhart Tolle

The body is a foundation of the conscious mind … the special kind of mental images of the body produced in body-mapping structures, constitute the protoself, which foreshadows the self to be … the body is best conceived as the rock on which the protoself is built, while the protoself is the pivot around which the conscious mind turns….I hypothesize that the first and most elementary product of the protoself is primordial feelings, which occur spontaneously and continuously whenever one is awake.  They provide a direct experience of one’s own living body, wordless, unadorned, and connected to nothing but sheer existence ……..all feelings of emotion are complex musical variations on primordial feelings.

Antonio Damasio, Self comes to mind.

Inner work is the key to happiness

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The way to solve the problem isn’t through trying to make everything right and pleasant on the external dimension,

but to develop the right understanding, the right attitude towards ourselves.

Ajahn Sumedho

Inner and outer life on the first day of Spring

Karl Duffy1 Comment

This morning two birds
fell down the side of the maple tree

like a tuft of fire, a wheel of fire
a love knot out of control as they plunged through the air
pressed against each other
and I thought

how I meant to live a quiet life
how I meant to live a life of mildness and meditation
tapping the careful words against each other

and I thought—
as though I were suddenly spinning, like a bar of silver
as though I had shaken my arms and lo! they were wings—

of the Buddha
when he rose from his green garden
when he rose in his powerful ivory body

when he turned to the long dusty road without end
when he covered his hair with ribbons and the petals of flowers
when he opened his hands to the world.

Mary Oliver, Spring

Our overactive minds

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Most times that I fret and chafe about an upcoming engagement, someone cancels; most times I dread a coming moment,  the moment never comes. It’s not the world that I need to change, but the mayhem that my overactive mind makes of the world. It’s more than capable of seeing a blue car stationary, and constructing out of it a six-act melodrama

Pico Iyer, The Folly of the Weather Forecast

We always want something different

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Suffering is the desire for more choices than reality offers, but reality is without options. Our mind creates mental alternatives when there are none in reality, and we do so by bargaining with reality through our desires and fears. The sense-of-self comes into play when we think that reality can be altered. As we consider the options we take ourselves out of the state of abiding within the moment into acting on the moment. When the moment becomes adversarial, we become self invested and determined to do something about it. This creates a sense of someone being on one side and reality being on the other, as if life was happening to us.

Rodney Smith, Stepping out of Self-Deception

What shapes our mind, our thoughts, our moods

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My experience is what I agree to attend to,

Only those items I notice shape my mind.

William James, American psychologist and philosopher.