Month: September 2012

Open to where you are

Karl Duffy1 Comment

In human life, if you feel that you have made a mistake, you don’t try to undo the past or the present, but you just accept where you are and work from there. Tremendous openness as to where you are is necessary. This also applies to the practice of meditation, for instance. A person should learn to meditate on the spot, in the given moment, rather than thinking, “. . . When I reach pension age, I’m going to retire and receive a pension, and I’m going to build my house in Hawaii or the middle of India, or maybe the Gobi Desert, and THEN I’m going to enjoy myself. I’ll live a life of solitude and then I’ll really meditate.” Things never happen that way.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Transcending Madness

Our primary connection to life

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With our mobile phones and wireless devices, we are now able to be so connected that we can be in touch with anyone and everyone at any time, and do business anywhere. But have you noticed that, in the process, we run the risk of never being in touch with ourselves? In the overall seduction, we can easily forget that our primary connection to life is through our own interiority – the experiencing of our own body and all our senses, including the mind –  which allow us to touch and be touched by the world, and to act appropriately in response to it. And for that, we need moments that are not filled with anything, in which we do not jump to get in one more phone call or send one more email, or plan one more event, or add to our to-do list.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Stop trying to make things different

Karl Duffy2 Comments

The easiest way to relax is to stop trying to make things different. Rather than trying to create another state, simply allow space for whatever is going on. If you sit down after being busy and your mind feels agitated or chaotic, try just seeing that state for what it is and accepting it. You might frame your whole mind-body expereince with the mental note “chaos, chaos”. Instead of having an agenda to change the quality of your energy, you enjoy the use of this simple key to just open to the energy that is there. This does not mean either spacing out or being entanglesd in your agitated thoughts. Rather, through accpetance we settle back into natural awarenss of whatever is present. Then things settle down by themselves in a natural way. Struggle comes  from not accepting what is present.

Joseph Goldstein, Insight Meditation

Letting yourself be

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Meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment.

It’s not about getting somewhere else,  but about allowing yourself to be where you already are.

Jon Kabat Zinn,  Wherever you go, there you are

A simple practice for working with fears

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Just the wind blowing: allowing life to move through this moment:

Take a comfortable position,

Now imagine you are in a beautiful place in nature. Surrounded by beauty you can feel the wind blowing around you

Let all of your conscious experience — sounds, sensations, thoughts, emotions, everything — become the wind.

Feel all of it moving and changing, arriving, moving around and over you, and then going.

Notice how the wind takes on different qualities — soft, strong, harsh, gusty, gentle.

Relax as the wind blows around you.

Let it come and go in all its forms. You remain here, in calmness, abiding.

Jeffrey Brantley  and Wendy Millstine, Daily Mediations for Calming Your Anxious Mind,

The only moment we actually have

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We do not need some ideal or romantic fairy tale of what would be best for us.

What we need most is what is already given to us: the actuality of things as they are in the only moment we will ever have –  this one.

Jon Kabat Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners.