Category: Be fully present

Working with difficult moments

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

When pain or distress arises in our bodies, our conditioned reaction is to pin it down and solidify it with concepts. We say “my knee,” “my back,” “my illness,” and the floodgates of apprehension are opened. We predict a dire future for ourselves, fear the intensification of the pain, and at times dissolve into helplessness and despair. Our concepts serve both to make the pain more rigid and to undermine our capacity to respond to it skillfully. We are caught in the tension of wanting to divorce ourselves from a distressed body while the intensity of pain keeps drawing us back into our body. Meditation offers a very different way of responding to pain in our bodies. Instead of employing strategies to avoid it, we learn to investigate what is actually being experienced within our bodies calmly and curiously. We can bring a compassionate, accepting attention directly to the core of pain. This is the first step towards healing and releasing the agitation and dread that often intensify pain.

Christine Feldman, Suffering is Optional

Tune into what is happening in the body

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We experience our lives through our bodies, whether we are aware of it or not. Yet we are usually so mesmerized by our ideas about the world that we miss out on much of our direct sensory experience. Even when we are aware of feeling a strong breeze, the sound of rain on the roof, a fragrance in the air, we rarely remain with the experience long enough to inhabit it fully. In most moments, an overlay of inner dialogue comments on what is happening and plans what we might do next.…The basic meditation instructions …. were to be mindful of the changing stream of sensations without trying to hold on to them, change them, or resist them….Being mindful of sensations does not mean standing apart and observing like a distant witness. Rather, we directly experience what is happening in our bodies.

Tara Brach, Come to your Senses

A wholehearted relationship even with difficult emotions

Karl Duffy2 Comments

When you refrain from habitual thoughts and behavior, the uncomfortable feelings will still be there. They don’t magically disappear. Over the years, I’ve come to call resting with the discomfort “the detox period,” because when you don’t act on your habitual patterns, it’s like giving up an addiction. You’re left with the feelings you were trying to escape. The practice is to make a wholehearted relationship with that.

Pema Chodron, Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change

Happiness is an inside job

Karl Duffy1 Comment

No one can harm you , not even your own worst enemy, as much as your own mind untrained. 

And no one can help you, not even your most loving mother and father, as much as your own mind well-trained.

The Buddha

A simple way of not getting too caught up today

Karl Duffy1 Comment

This vanishes, that vanishes, but that which knows
their vanishing doesn’t vanish. . . .

All that remains is simple
awareness, utterly pure.

Ajahn Maha Boowa

Not fighting with our lives

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Being silent doesn’t require being in a quiet place and it doesn’t mean not saying words. It means “receiving in a balanced,  non-combative way what is happening”. With or without words,  the hope of my heart is that it will be able to relax and acknowledge the truth of my situation with compassion.

Sylvia Boorstein, That’s Funny, you don’t look Buddhist