Category: Be fully present

Looking for treasure outside ourselves

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We can spend a good portion of our life waiting for some time in the future when we have the time to do the things we want, or the things we feel are good for us. We look forward to our holidays, or to weekend seminars or to doing a course, believing that then we will finally get it together. It is rare that things actually happen in this way. The conditions are already available to us, in the moments of each day. We can start with where we are, not matter how messy that is, or how distracted we feel.

Solitude is not found so much by looking outside the boundaries of your own dwelling, as by staying within.  Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future.  Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

Sunday Quote: Being comfortable in our own skin

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If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path.

Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation

Simple Daily Practices: Transform your moments of waiting.

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When we are forced to wait, say in a traffic jam, our instinct is to do something to distract ourselves from the discomfort of waiting. We turn on the radio, call or text someone on the phone, or just sit and fume. Practicing mindfulness while waiting helps people find many small moments in the day when they can bring the thread of awareness up from where is lies hiding in the complex fabric of their lives. Waiting, a common event that usually produces negative emotions, can be transformed into a gift, the gift of free time to practice. The mind benefits doubly: first, by abandoning negative mindstates, and second, by gaining the beneficial effects of even a few extra minutes of practice woven into the day.

Jan Chozen Bays

More on Pausing

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If right now our emotional reaction to seeing a certain person or hearing certain news is to fly into a rage or to get despondent or something equally extreme, it’s because we have been cultivating that particular habit for a very long time. But as my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, we can approach our lives as an experiment. In the next moment, in the next hour, we could choose to stop, to slow down, to be still for a few seconds. We could experiment with interrupting the usual chain reaction, and not spin off in the usual way. We don’t need to blame someone else, and we don’t need to blame ourselves.  Pausing is very helpful in this process. It creates a momentary contrast between being completely self-absorbed and being awake and present. You just stop for a few seconds, breathe deeply, and move on. In the middle of just living, which is usually a pretty caught-up experience characterized by a lot of internal discussion, you just pause.

Pema Chodron, The Power of the Pause, O Magazine

Having a quiet mind…..

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Can you be happy where you are, in your life, at this moment?

If this was a problem in Pascal’s time – more than 300 years ago – it is even more so today. IN a world increasingly driven by the need to achieve, and by advertising, media and social networking, we can physically be in one place but miles away from it in our mind and in the thoughts and aspirations which the images produce. I was reminded of this yesterday, standing in line in a boulangerie – in a beautiful place beside the sea and palm trees – when the man in front of me said “Yes, my body may be on holidays, but my mind is still in the office”. This difficulty to switch off – even in a place of great natural beauty – makes it hard for us to be where we are at this moment, physically, but also in the sense of being with what is the realiuty of our life at this actual time in our history. We find ourselves living in our thoughts, dreams and worries, and strangely sometimes seem to prefer to be there.

All man’s miseries derive from not being
able to sit quietly in a room alone.

Blaise Pascal, French Philosopher.


Open to us now

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The seed of suffering in you may be strong,

but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.

Thich Nhat Hahn