Many of us reserve our deepest blame for ourselves. If instead, we can accept our experience with kindness, we begin to break the inner cycle of violence. This doesn’t mean we give ourselves permission to continue to act in harmful ways. But we don’t condemn ourselves either. Instead, we identify exactly what we’re feeling in the moment — physical discomfort, shame, remorse — and meet our experience with a kind attention. As we do so, our sense of identity grows beyond a “flawed” self, and we begin to trust our essence as compassionate awareness. We gradually become more responsible — more able to respond wisely to our present circumstances.
Tara Brach, Creating Peace by letting go of Blame
Suffering can be differentiated from pain. There is pain in life, without doubt, but suffering is the extra tension in the mind that is unable to accommodate change and accept the truth of its experience. The first two noble truths are that life is difficult and that suffering is the tension in the mind that insists an experience be different from the way it is. It’s the imperative in the mind that this moment be different that causes our suffering
The essence of the practice life involves cultivating awareness. This process has two basic aspects. The first is clarifying the mental process. The second is experiencing — entering into awareness of the physical reality of the present moment. When we’re standing in the muddy water of everyday life, practice is often not simple and clear. But part of our challenge is to bring a certain precision and impeccability to our efforts. That’s why it’s important to keep returning to these two basic aspects of practice: first, seeing through the mental process, with all its noise; and second, entering the non-conceptual silence of reality as-it-is. As practitioners we learn to honestly and relentlessly observe the mental or conceptual process — thoughts, emotional reactions, strategies and fears — and then bring ourselves back again and again to the physical reality of the present moment.
When we are physically and mentally calm, we have the ability to make choices in our lives. Often when we lose control we become physically or emotionally reactive. Not only does being aware of something as simple as breathing tell us a lot about the emotional state of ourselves and others, it gives us the chace to truly observe how and why we react in a certain way to specific circumstances. By anchoring in the present moment with our breath, the benefits of being in the moment are complimented by the natural relaxation that occurs with conscious breathing. Learning to be aware of our breathing is one of the single best tools we have for keeping a foothold in the present moment.
Solitude is an elusive thing that needs to find us rather than us finding it. We tend to picture solitude in a naïve way as something that we can “soak ourselves in” as we would soak ourselves in a warm bath. We tend to picture solitude this way: We are busy, pressured, and tired. We finally have a chance to slip away for a weekend. We rent a cabin, complete with a fireplace, in a secluded woods. We pack some food, some wine, and some soft music and we resist packing any phones, iPads, or laptops. This is to be a quiet weekend, a time to drink wine by the fireplace and listen to the birds sing, a time of solitude.
Mindfulbalance 