Author: Karl Duffy

This is a Mindfulness Practice Blog written in Laois, Ireland, containing reflections on meditation practice, psychological growth, spirituality and wellness which hopefully may encourage and benefit others as they reflect on their lives and seek to develop a more balanced, mindful and conscious approach to it.

Opening to how things actually are

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Sometimes we experience dukkha quite directly in our meditation: our knees hurt and our backs hurt and our minds hurt. At other times it’s more subtle. We can’t seem to concentrate; we feel restless, we don’t think we are doing very well. Then our perception of suffering comes from seeing that we cannot control things. Many many times I told my teacher, Sayadaw U Pandita,  “Things are going very badly. My head hurts …and my mind is all over the place and I cannot practice. Things are really bad”.  He would just say, “That’s dukkha isn’t it”  I would look at him expectantly, waiting for him to tell me the magic trick, that one technique that would make all the suffering go away…… But all he would say is “That’s dukkha isn’t it”.

After a while I began to hear what he was saying. “This is a rightful perception”, he was telling me. “This isn’t just a personal drama. This is an opening into one aspect of life. This is part of how it is. This experience has to be seen and acknowledged.” You don’t have to immerse yourself in suffering or get lost in it; but in order to be fully open,  you have to let the truth of dukkha in as well. It does not mean that we should be passive or that taking action is never appropriate. Rather it means that we hurt ourselves most by fervently trying to control things so that we never have to suffer.

Joseph Goldstein, Suffering

Why stillness is difficult, and movement is easy

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A central ingredient in most forms of practice is stillness…. [But…] It takes time to really see that thoughts and emotions are mere movements of the mind. They are, after all, the fabric of who we think we are, and everything we do is an expression of thought and emotion. We take them so seriously. But take a closer look, test this against your own experience, and see for yourself. If we can gain this recognition, we are on our way to freedom,  for instead of being sucked into the contents of our mind and acting out everything that arises within it, we will watch those contents melt like snowflakes on a hot rock.

According to the Bon tradition… we have about eighty thousand thoughts a day, which means the mind moves eighty thousand times a day. We can feel the velocity of this movement within the first five minutes of sitting meditation. This discovery then leads to the next: the voluntary and involuntary movements that constitute our life are just the mental extensions of the voluntary and involuntary movements of our mind. We move physically because we move mentally. Our fundamental addiction to movement, therefore, is habituation to the movement of mind. We are addicted to thought.

Andrew Holecek, The Power and the Pain.

Still the mind in order to love

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The eternal moment is outside of time, is not a part of our past or our future, and yet it is lived amidst all our everyday activities. It is in the eternal moment that love is born. Love does not belong to time, and its timeless quality is well known to all lovers. The lover has to learn to still the mind in order to catch the moment and stay true to love’s unfolding. Wayfarers tread a path that leads from illusions of time to the eternal moment that belongs to the soul.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Le, Signs of God

Sunday Quote: Living well

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My most inspiring thought is that this place, if I am to live well in it,

requires and deserves a lifetime of the most careful attention.

Wendell Berry

Words

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Words are the cognitive contraptions we use to work our way through a world of uncertainty. Words can free us: as symbols they are essential to distance us from experience enough to compare and contrast and reveal patterns in a complex universe. Seeing those patterns with ideas framed in our mind also enables us to communicate those insights to others. In these ways words are a wonderful gateway to understanding and sharing.

Yet words can also entrap us. If we do not recognize the limitations of their boundaries, if we see them as real, their top-down influences on our lives can be devastating. We can come to believe that “intelligence” is something we are either born with, or not. We can think that “we” are good and “they” bad. We can even feel that “I” is something so real  and important that “you” don’t matter. Letting go of such top-down influences is the art of mindful awareness. The receptivity of presence allows us to unleash the shackles that automatically enslave us.

Daniel J. Siegel. The Mindful Brain

Finding space in our inner chatter

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Silence, a stilling of not only the voices outside but the inner voices, the roof brain chatter. Now, without the babble or words – inner and outer – I watch my mind, notice when a thought arises. I turn my attention inward, asking, “Who is thinking this thought?” As the mind turns to look, the thinker seems to disappear. But a focus comes from asking, a clearing, a deepening. No “me,” but a presence. Awareness.

When I first worked in a restaurant, I used to daydream of a mute helper, someone who had no interest whatsoever in speaking, She…wouldn’t tell about her plans for vacation, the fights with her mother, the ins and outs of her most recent relationship. In my daydream of a mute helper, I was envisioning a future version of myself, of course. My imagination was sending directions, subtle hints as to how to proceed. How to glimpse the sky, how to open into vastness. The odd thing is that in addition to this sense of spaciousness, I’m starting to feel close to people, to understand and sympathize with them on a new level, to participate in their lives in unexpected ways, to notice those around me as something more than irritants, as subjects rather than objects.

Kimberly Snow, In Buddha’s Kitchen