Category: Be fully present

Interpreting

Karl Duffy2 Comments

jigsaw_pieces

We all have a tendency to rush to interpretation in our lives, and that can present a challenge to being mindful of our experience. Instead of staying mindful of whatever is happening in the moment, we immediately begin to interpret our experience and create a story based on past associations and attitudes we have about ourselves and others. However, our interpretation is only our view of our experience; it isn’t the actual experience. As soon as we start to interpret an experience, we’re no longer having the experience, we’re having an experience of our interpretation: therefore, we miss the real experience.

 Phillip Moffit, Maintaining Mindfulness in Daily life

Where are we?

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File:Where, where ? (2848309312).jpg

Meanwhile, here we are, missing the fullness of the present moment, which is where the soul resides.  It’s not like you have to go someplace else to get it.  So the challenge here is, Can we live this moment fully?  …. The mind has a life of its own.  It carries you away.  Over a lifetime, you may wind up in the situation where you are never actually where you find yourself.  You’re always someplace else, lost, in your head, and therefore in a kind of dysfunctional or non-optimal state.  Why dysfunctional?  Because the only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment, because this is the only moment any of us ever gets.  You’re only here now; you’re only alive in this moment.

Jon Kabat Zinn

photo mwanasimba

Connecting

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The nature of mindfulness is that it is never overcome by whatever is the present object of awareness. If we are mindful of a twisted or distorted state of mind, the mindfulness is not twisted or distorted. Even the most painful state of mind or the most difficult feeling in the body does not ruin mindfulness. A true opening, born of mindfulness, is marked by spaciousness and grace.

In our culture we are taught to push away, to avoid our feelings. This kind of aversion is the action of a mind caught in separation. Whether in the active, fiery form of anger and rage, or in a more inward, frozen form like fear, the primary function of these mental states is to separate us from what we are experiencing. But the only way that we can be free from suffering ourselves and avoid doing harm to others is by connection – a connection to our own pain and, through awareness and compassion, a connection to the pain of others.

Sharon Salzberg

Just doing nothing

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What we are talking about is very practical. Mindfulness practice is simple and completely feasible. And because we are working with the mind that experiences life directly, just by sitting and doing nothing, we are doing a tremendous amount.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

It belongs here

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Letting go of form is trusting in the immediacy of awareness.

And awareness is real. It isn’t abstract, it isn’t some kind of concept I have that I don’t recognize immediately. Its more like the space in this room and the forms in space. They are what they are. and I no longer go from one thing to another saying “I like this, I don’t like that” but recognize that whatever is in this space belongs here at this moment. It doesnt matter whether I approve or disapprove of it or whether it is good or bad. It is here, this is the way it is, and this is learning to trust in awareness, which doesn’t pick or choose.

Ajahn Sumedho

 

Being at home in our deepest self

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stupa

At times in life we can have a sense of just wandering on, feeling a bit lost, when the moments we find ourselves in don’t seem to quite fit with what we were hoping for. At other times we find ourselves at home, when a spacious sense of acceptance becomes the more constant abiding. This can happen whether we are in Ireland or Geneva, at work or on pilgrimage, when the mind gets in contact with its own essential goodness and we switch off the need to be elsewhere. We realize that we are not really going anywhere, but not really staying anywhere either.

Meditation is …. not about getting somewhere else, 

but about allowing yourself to be where you already are.

Jon Kabat Zinn,  Wherever you go, there you are

photo of Ruwanweliseya Stupa, Anuradhapura, by dear friends Patrick and Bow on pilgrimage in Sri Lanka