Be fully present – Page 751

…and on finding beauty close to home

June 16, 2012June 16, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Men build their dreams as they build their circles of friends. God is in the bits and pieces of Everyday. A kiss here and a laugh again, and sometimes tears; A pearl necklace around the neck of poverty.

Today being Bloomsday, I Felt I should post something from an Irish writer. Not Joyce, but rather I chose the poet Patrick Kavanagh, whose poems celebrate the ways in which the most trivial things reveal God. He saw the sacred in the small details of everyday life and in the unexpected places of ordinary events. He believed that meaning can be found within and in the mundane tasks of each day, even in the poor landscape where he lived in Ireland. For him, there was no task or moment in the day which could not become an occasion for grace and where meaning could be found.

This reminds me today to try to pay attention. When I am not conscious of this, I can be pulled by more exciting or demanding sights on my journey, sounds, fashions, headlines, and the advertisements that are specially designed to capture my attention. I can get distracted by my desire to be part of something more stimulating elsewhere and neglect the quiet routine in my daily life. These big attractions always suggests that more and somewhere else is better, that our lives are not complete until we have what we feel is missing. However, often what we need is not missing; We do not have to go far, but can find it right in front of us, so we need to cultivate the vital work of noticing in our practice. As the quote below reminds us, not paying attention is a type of terminal sleepwalking through life, missing out on all the richness presented to us each day:

Heedfulness is the Path to the Deathless,heedlessness is the Path to Death.

The heedful do not die,the heedless are as dead already.

Dhammapada 21

Always switched on

June 15, 2012June 14, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them…To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — continuously. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.

We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking.

Linda Stone, Continual Partial Attention

A way of being with the joyful and the painful

June 15, 2012June 13, 2012 Karl Duffy3 Comments

If we practice mindfulness, we get in touch with the refreshing and joyful aspects of life in us and around us, the things we are not able to touch when we live in forgetfulness. Mindfulness makes things like our eyes, our heart, our non-toothache, the beautiful moon and the trees deeper and more beautiful. If we touch these wonderful things with mindfulness, they will reveal their full splendor.

[But also]..when we touch our pain with mindfulness, we will begin to transform it. When a baby is crying in the living room, his mother goes in right away to hold him tenderly in her arms. Because mother is made of love and tenderness, when she does that, love and tenderness penetrate the baby and, in only a few minutes, the baby will probably stop crying. Mindfulness is the mother who cares for your pain every time it begins to cry.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Touching Peace

Appreciation, today

June 13, 2012May 31, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

Have you ever noticed how much emphasis some people place on even the smallest amount of difficulty in their lives, and how little time they spend reflecting on moments of happiness? Part of the reason for this is the idea that happiness is somehow rightfully ours, and that everything else is therefore wrong or out of place.

The idea of taking time out to be grateful may sound a little trite to some, but it’s essential if we want to get some more headspace. It’s very difficult to be caught up in lots of distracting thoughts when there is a strong sense of appreciation in your life. And by developing a more heartfelt appreciation of what we have, we also begin to see more clearly what’s missing in the lives of others.

Andy Puddicombe, Ten Tips for Living more Mindfully

Changing our relationship to our expectations

June 12, 2012June 10, 2012 Karl Duffy2 Comments

We can learn to recognize that the difficulty is our path instead of trying to escape from it. This is a radical yet necessary change in our perspective. When uncomfortable things happen to us, we rarely want to have anything to do with them. We might respond with the belief ‘Things shouldn’t be this way’ or ‘Life shouldn’t be so messy.’ Who says? Who says that life shouldn’t be a mess? When life is not fitting our expectations of how it’s supposed to be, we usually try to change it to fit our expectations. But the key to practice is not to try to change our life but to change our relationship to our expectations — to learn to see whatever is happening as our path.

Ezra Bayda

Becoming grounded in the wind

June 11, 2012June 11, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

I spent the last ten days on retreat in England, where the weather was far from what could be likened to Summer. They are calling it a European Monsoon, and certainly, one day, the wind blew strongly, breaking branches from the trees and even making standing still quite difficult. A bit like our ongoing, daily, experience of the mind:

Our minds are like flags in the wind, fluttering this way and that, depending on which way the wind blows. Even if we don’t want to feel angry, jealous, lonely, or depressed, we’re carried away by such feelings and by the thoughts and physical sensations that accompany them. We’re not free; we can’t see other options, other possibilities. The goal of attention, or shamatha, practice is to become aware of awareness. Awareness is the basis, or what you might call the “support,” of the mind. It is steady and unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached. When we recognize and become grounded in awareness of awareness, the “wind” of emotion may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward, watching the shifts and changes with the intention of becoming familiar with that aspect of consciousness that recognizes “Oh, this is what I’m feeling, this is what I’m thinking.” As we do so, a bit of space opens up within us. With practice, that space—which is the mind’s natural clarity—begins to expand and settle.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoché