Month: October 2014

An act of hospitality

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Mindfulness is an act of hospitality.

A way of learning to treat ourselves with kindness and care that slowly begins to percolate into the deepest recesses of our being while gradually offering us the possibility of relating to others in the same manner. Working with whatever is present is enough. There is no need to condemn ourselves for not feeling loving or kind. Rather, the process simply asks us to entertain the possibility of offering hospitality to ourselves no matter what we are feeling or thinking.

This week try taking some time to explore the possibility of sitting with yourself as if you were your own best friend.

Saki Santorelli, Befriending Self

photo Carriec

 

Sunday Quote: Movement

Karl Duffy1 Comment

river

The deepest words of the wise…teach us…

the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows

or the sound of the water when it is flowing

Antonio Marchado

photo of the Allondon river near Crozet, France.

Holding both efforts

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File:Hananuki valley Shiomi-taki bridge.jpg

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning,

that without listening speaking no longer heals,

that without distance closeness cannot cure.

Henri Nouwen

A way of direct experience

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The way that can be spoken is not the eternal way
That which can be named is not the eternal name

Lao Tzu,  Tao Te Ching, 1

“Talking about a path is not walking that path.
Thinking about life is not living“.

Directly experiencing life is not something we do easily. By the time we are adults, our experience is mediated through a multitude of conceptual filters that provide a constant commentary about our life, but that ignore the thing itself. This process is so deeply conditioned in most of us that we don’t even notice it. We wander through day after day with our minds spinning an endless stream of thoughts, judgments, hopes, fantasies, critiques, and plans, all mixed with a babble of advertising jingles and fragments of television shows.  Lao-tzu suggests that this habitual commentary on life, though a natural part of being human, is not the same thing as a fully lived life. At the same time, he does not totally discount the conceptual thinking process. We make a certain kind of sense out of our life through the use of categories, thoughts, and words. But,  he suggests … these thoughts and words are gateways to life, not life itself.

 Commentary on the Tao Te Ching by William Martin in A Path and A Practice

photo:  without you

Substance and weight

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File:Autumn.jpg

How often do our thoughts condition reactions in the mind, as if the thought itself had substance? Yet the thought of a friend is not the friend; it is a thought. How many life scenarios have we created, directed and starred in  and,  for those moments, taken to be the experience itself? We also may get carried away by the intense energy of our emotions, swept up in a typhoon of the mind and body. To be lost in emotions is not to be mindful of their energy; and when there is a strong identified involvement with them, there is no space in the mind for seeing clearly what is happening.

Joseph Goldstein, in Seeking the Heart of Wisdom

photo autumn wind by jojo

Release from effort

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Remind yourself to loosen up your opinions about what you think you are doing or where you think you are going. This is a practice that can be done informally, with regular reminders to yourself throughout the day. Or you can do a formal ‘wandering’ practice: Sitting in an upright posture, allow yourself to be with your breath, your body and all your sense perceptions, thoughts and emotions. You can notice how all these experiences come and go, as long as you don’t try to hold onto any of them. This is a practice of release from effort, and allows a sense of peace and not-knowing to arise naturally.

Melissa Myozen Backer Roshi in Richard Fields, A Year of Living Mindfully

 photo: brookie