Category: Be fully present

Mid-Winter wisdom

Karl Duffy5 Comments

Sometimes withdrawal and letting go is as much part of growth as is achievement and moving forward:

There is a tendency to want to hurry from autumn to spring, to avoid the long dark days that winter brings. But winter darkness has a positive side to it. As we gather to celebrate the first turn from winter to spring, we are invited to recognize and honor the beauty in the often unwanted season of winter. Let us invite our hearts to be glad for the courage winter proclaims. Let us be grateful for the wisdom winter brings in teaching us about the need for withdrawal as an essential part of renewal. Let us also encourage our spirits as Earth prepares to come forth from this time of withdrawal into a season filled with light.

Joyce Rupp and Macrina Wiederkehr, The Circle of Life

What remains

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The shortest days of the year. The balance between light and darkness. A time to let go of those thoughts which hold us back and stand firm in that which we are

I move in the descent of days

from what was dreamed to what remains.

Wendell Berry, Boone

The days shorten: living fully

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past.

To come into the present is to stop the war.

Jack Kornfield

Fully here

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The present moment is never unbearable if you live in it fully.

What is unbearable is to have your body here at 10 A.M. and your mind at 6 P.M.

your body in Bombay and your mind in San Francisco.

Anthony de Mello, sj, The Heart of the Enlightened

How to work with fears

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Are we intimate with the whole physical movement of fear? Or do we just label it “fear”, say, “I don’t want to feel this way,” and then try everything possible to get away from it, not to experience it? When fear and anxiety actually come into awareness, there is a precious opportunity to experience the whole thing, to go through it completely from beginning to end without any need for escape.

At the first sign of scary, disagreeable physical thoughts and feelings, why not stop and attend? It’s not impossible! “What is going on right now?” Awareness happens for everyone when there is the interest and readiness to be in touch directly, immediately, without description or explanation or diagnosis. When there is intimate touch with what is happening right here, this moment, without any separation…

Separation is this thinking: “I can’t bear it. It’s too much for me. Too dangerous.” Once this physical-mental resistance is directly discovered, it does not continue. Awareness takes its place. It’s like an exchange of energy…

The significant thing is not what it is that is touched and discovered but that there is no separation in being. Then whatever is touched changes. Whatever is there is not the same anymore when it is unconditionally allowed to be there in the fullness of awareness…

Toni Parker, The Light of Discovery

Not identifying with where we are today

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We try to maintain a relaxed observing,  and not identify with our thoughts. The heart of mindfulness practice:

To think ‘I am screwed up’, is a value judgement, isn’t it? ‘Screwed up’ makes the ‘I am’. It is identifying with a certain kind of condition, a feeling about oneself personally. If we leave off the ‘screwed up’ bit, we get more to the reality of the moment ― ‘Right now I am . . .’ and there is this sense of being here and now. This is a recognition of conscious experience as an entity. There is an entity but it is not personal any more; it is not ‘I am Ajahn Sumedho’ or ‘I am’ anything at all; it is just this sense of ‘I am’, of presence. Being a conscious entity is ― ‘like this’. Reflect on that and sustain it for a while, that sense of ‘I am’, without adding any personal conditions to it.

In this sense of ‘I am’, the body is ‘like this’. There is consciousness, there is the breath (one can be aware of just the breathing of the body, in-breathing and out-breathing.), there is the ‘sound of silence’, the background. And in this intuitive moment, one observes without adding any kind of personal quality.

Ajahn Sumedho, Try to have a Permanent Emotion.