Month: June 2012

Always switched on

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Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them…To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — continuously. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.

We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking.

Linda Stone, Continual Partial Attention

A way of being with the joyful and the painful

Karl Duffy3 Comments

If we practice mindfulness, we get in touch with the refreshing and joyful aspects of life in us and around us, the things we are not able to touch when we live in forgetfulness.  Mindfulness makes things like our eyes, our heart, our non-toothache, the beautiful moon and the trees deeper and more beautiful.  If we touch these wonderful things with mindfulness, they will reveal their full splendor. 

[But also]..when we touch our pain with mindfulness, we will begin to transform it.  When a baby is crying in the living room, his mother goes in right away to hold him tenderly in her arms. Because mother is made of love and tenderness, when she does that, love and tenderness penetrate the baby and, in only a few minutes, the baby will probably stop crying.  Mindfulness is the mother who cares for your pain every time it begins to cry.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Touching Peace

Lives as a to-do list

Karl Duffy2 Comments
Better is one handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and grasping after the wind. Ecclesiastes 4:6

Often our lives become so driven that we are moving through our moments to get to better ones at some later point. We live to check things off our to-do list, then fall into bed exhausted at the end of the day, only to jump up the next morning to get on the treadmill once again. This way of living, if we can call it living, is compounded by all the ways in which our lives are now driven by the ever-quickening expectations we place on ourselves and that others place on us and we on them, generated in large measure by our increasing dependence on ubiquitous digital technology and its ever-accelerating effects on our pace of life. If we are not careful, it is all too easy to fall into becoming more of a human doing than a human being, and forget who is doing all the doing, and why. 

Jon Kabat Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners

A way of working with emotions when we feel flooded

Karl Duffy1 Comment

As I referred to recently, I was in the UK last week on a retreat directed by Ajahn Sucitto. So I quote him here, partly in reference to the very unseasonal weather they are having there, with communities struggling with severe flooding. Like most weather conditions, flooding can help us in our reflection on the mind, on how to work with  things that we cannot control, or things in our life change without us expecting them.

Mindfulness, the ability to bear witness is a tremendously powerful and skilful factor of mind. The Buddha called mindfulness the floodstopper. It stops the floods of greed, hatred and delusion. With mindfulness we give ourselves a choice with regard to following what arises in the mind; and keeping that choice available is something you want to go on doing because the mind almost longs to get trapped – and there are plenty of sights, sounds, flavours and ideas that can sweet you away out of aware responsibility. As we carry our body with us all the time, we can use that as a base for mindfulness; a place where we can stop the floods. We can turn our attention to the body and just refer to the body in the body, as it is – that is as sensations, energies and form, rather than the impressions of beauty or ugliness that identification imposes upon it.

Ajahn Sucitto, Seeing the Way.

What defines us

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Our dreams reveal to us the basic truth of life: years are biological, the spirit is eternal. The number of our years does not define us. There is in the human being a life force that never dies. It is the life force that proves to us that age does not fossilize us. Down deep, where our souls live, we stay forever young. It is this surging, driving force that brings us to the bar of life every day of our lives, whatever our age, however much we have been through, prepared to live life to the hilt again. It is only the cold, clear light of dawn that damps it, the fear in ourselves that th years have taken us beyond the right to be active. It is our own fault is we refuse to think again all the great ideas of our life – and our own position on each of them.

Joan Chittister, The Gift of Years

Appreciation, today

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Have you ever noticed how much emphasis some people place on even the smallest amount of difficulty in their lives, and how little time they spend reflecting on moments of happiness? Part of the reason for this is the idea that happiness is somehow rightfully ours, and that everything else is therefore wrong or out of place.

The idea of taking time out to be grateful may sound a little trite to some, but it’s essential if we want to get some more headspace. It’s very difficult to be caught up in lots of distracting thoughts when there is a strong sense of appreciation in your life. And by developing a more heartfelt appreciation of what we have, we also begin to see more clearly what’s missing in the lives of others.

Andy Puddicombe, Ten Tips for Living more Mindfully