Category: Be fully present

Non-doing in stillness and activity

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A new MBSR group started last evening. However, new or experienced, young or old, the practice is the same: intentionally seeing what is present each moment before our eyes, tuning in to the richness of what is already there, switching off the leaning in our being and in our doing.

Non-doing has nothing to do with being indolent or passive. Quite the contrary. It takes great courage and energy to cultivate non-doing, both in stillness and in activity. Nor is it easy to make a special time for non-doing and to keep at it in the face of everything in our lives which needs to be done.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

The depth beneath our thoughts.

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In 1929 the British Broad­casting Corporation decided to start broadcasting “live silence” in memory of the dead instead of just halting transmission for two minutes every day; it was important, it was felt, to hear the rustle of papers, the singing of the birds outside, an occasional cough. As a BBC spokesman put it, with rare wisdom, silence is “a solvent which destroys personality and gives us leave to be great and universal.” It permits us, in short, to be who we are and could be if only we had the openness and trust. A chapel is where we hear something and nothing, ourselves and everyone else, a silence that is not the absence of noise, but the presence of something much deeper: the depth beneath our thoughts.

A chapel is where you can hear something beating below your heart.

Pico Iyer, Where Silence Is Sacred

Importance in the ordinary

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The ordinary arts we practice every day at home

are of more importance to the soul

than their simplicity might suggest

Thomas Moore

How we give up fixed positions and get peace

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Through examining and contemplating perceptions, we begin to see the relative truths of the angles or biases that we have, the blaming, self-blaming or justifying, or ignoring. Perceptions don’t give you an ultimate reality; they give you a subjective readout of where you’re coming from. Widening the perceptual field means the mind becomes more peaceful, less defensive and less obsessive….You realize everything and anything that is held onto can’t be an ultimate truth, it’s just a naming, based upon a position. Through insight into perception, the mind has given up on “naming” and has realized peace.

Ajahn Sucitto, Working with Perception

How to work with negative thoughts today

Karl Duffy1 Comment

One of the biggest problems with thoughts is that we tend to believe everything they say: “If I am thinking it, it must be true.”I have learned that the best way to deal with excessive thinking is to just listen to it, to listen to the mind. Listening is much more effective than trying to stop thought or cut it off. When we listen there is a different mode employed in the heart. Instead of trying to cut it off, we receive thought without making anything out of it. When we look at thought in this way we aren’t being pulled into it. We can just look at it. We don’t reject it or suppress it, but we don’t buy into it either. We don’t make more out of it than is there. That attitude of listening, of opening to and receiving thought, has a liberating quality in-and-of itself.

Ajahn Amaro, Thinking

Moving fluidly through our experiences

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Awareness is able to hold everything that passes through the mind – thoughts, emotions, sensations – in its kind,  non-judging space. It holds things lightly, without becoming identified with them. This “flowing” quality of awareness allows us move with the arising and falling away of conditions, without becoming fixed in any of their forms.

A person  fundamentally does not dwell anywhere. The white clouds are fascinated with the green mountain’s foundation. The bright moon cherishes being carried along with the flowing water. The clouds part and the mountains appear. The moon sets and the water is cool. Each bit of autumn contains vast interpenetration without bounds.

Hongzhi, 12th Century Zen writer