Month: September 2012

How to work with negative thoughts today

Karl Duffy1 Comment

One of the biggest problems with thoughts is that we tend to believe everything they say: “If I am thinking it, it must be true.”I have learned that the best way to deal with excessive thinking is to just listen to it, to listen to the mind. Listening is much more effective than trying to stop thought or cut it off. When we listen there is a different mode employed in the heart. Instead of trying to cut it off, we receive thought without making anything out of it. When we look at thought in this way we aren’t being pulled into it. We can just look at it. We don’t reject it or suppress it, but we don’t buy into it either. We don’t make more out of it than is there. That attitude of listening, of opening to and receiving thought, has a liberating quality in-and-of itself.

Ajahn Amaro, Thinking

Moving fluidly through our experiences

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Awareness is able to hold everything that passes through the mind – thoughts, emotions, sensations – in its kind,  non-judging space. It holds things lightly, without becoming identified with them. This “flowing” quality of awareness allows us move with the arising and falling away of conditions, without becoming fixed in any of their forms.

A person  fundamentally does not dwell anywhere. The white clouds are fascinated with the green mountain’s foundation. The bright moon cherishes being carried along with the flowing water. The clouds part and the mountains appear. The moon sets and the water is cool. Each bit of autumn contains vast interpenetration without bounds.

Hongzhi, 12th Century Zen writer

A practice for seeing difficulties differently today

Karl Duffy2 Comments

1. Consider that in order to build character the practice of patience is essential.

2. See that the best way to practice patience requires an enemy.

3. Understand that in this way enemies are very valuable for the opportunities they provide.

4. Decide that instead of getting angry with those who block your wishes, you will inwardly  respond with gratitude.

By seeing things this way you will change your attitude toward adversity. This is very difficult but very rewarding. For only when faced with the work of adversity can we discover real inner strength.

The Dalai Lama, How to be Compassionate, A Handbook for Creating Inner Peace and a Happier World

Facing into our avoidance

Karl Duffy4 Comments

We first learnt to reject our experience when we were growing up. As children our feelings were often too overwhelming for our fledgling nervous system to handle, much less understand. So when an experience was too much, and the adults in our environment could not help us relate to it, we learnt to contract our mind and body, shutting ourselves down, like a circuit breaker. This was our way of preserving and protecting oursleves…….In time, these contractions  form the nucleus of an overall style of avoidance and denial.

Thus our psychological distress is composed of at least three elements: the basic pain of feelings that seem overwhelming, the contracting of mind and body to avoid feeling this pain; and the stress of continually having to prop up and defend an identity based on this avoidance and denial.

John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening

Fighting with how things are

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Each of us has our own silent War With Reality. This silent, unconscious war with How It Is unwittingly drives much of our behavior: We reach for the pleasant. We hate the unpleasant. We try to arrange the world so that we have only pleasant mind-states, and not unpleasant ones. We try to get rid of this pervasive state of unsatisfactoriness in whatever way we can — by changing things “out there.” By changing the world.  And whatever our particular War With Reality is, the result is always a pervasive sense of the unsatisfactoriness of the moment.

Stephen Cope, The Wisdom of Yoga

When you are tired or confused

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Regard meditation as recognizing the way things are. To start a meditation is always to recognize where you are right here and now, so that, if your mind is scrambled at the end of the day, then just recognize scrambling. Acknowledge the feeling and the aversion to it – the wanting it to be otherwise. This is the right way of meditating. If after a hectic day, you try and stop all your mental reactions when you go home, it will lead to failure, and then you will feel that you cannot meditate. So instead, you have to start using the situation as it is. You have to learn to objectify the feeling of being scrambled or the idea that you can’t meditate. You  have to just recognize that these feelings and ideas are objects of your mind and that you are a witness to them. If you feel a mess and confused, then practice fully accepting that.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Mind and the Way