Category: Make the most of life

Opportunites to do things differently

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The best way out is always through. Robert Frost

When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. You’re able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression. You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering negative seeds from now until the day you die. And, you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.

Pema Chodron, Practicing peace in Time of War

Transforming, not running away

Karl Duffy1 Comment

If this job is no good, change jobs, If this wife is no good, change wives. If this town is no good, change towns … The underlying thinking is that the reasons for these troubles is outside of you – in the location, in others, in circumstances …This way of thinking and seeing is an all-too-prevalent trap.  There is no successful escaping from yourself in the long run, only transformation … There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation is faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges.  In other words, you must be willing to let life itself become our teacher

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever you go, There you are

Small pockets of air

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It’s a cultural requirement that everyone should at least put on a show of maximum stress. But the average day is not a solid wall of activity — it’s more like Swiss cheese. The key to finding a little bit of personal time is to look for the small pockets of air. Remember, we’re talking about only a few minutes at a time. Most people don’t have the luxury of big two-to-four hour blocks of time, but nearly everyone can find one-to-twenty minute blocks. When you identify them in your own life, schedule them. When you come to the appointed hour, drop everything and get settled for meditation. If you’re still having trouble letting go, meditate anyway. It is better to meditate while distracted than not to meditate at all. If you miss a session because you can’t drop what you are doing, no worries: just get yourself back on track at the next appointed time.

David Dillard-Wright, Meditation for Multitaskers

The desert of the heart

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The summer was like a resort — you knew your way around. But then you needed to return to the desert of your heart. The lengthy solitude begins, the days turn dull again; the wind removes, like wilted leaves, the world you once could name. Through branches bare the sky looks down, the only sky you have; be ground now, evening song and land, with which this sky can blend. Be subject like a tool for use, mature and fit for much— so he, of whom we often heard, will know you at his touch.

Rilke, The Book of Hours

Learning from the season – let go

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Now is the end of summer, harvest time. From that point of view, [Fall ] is a chance to harvest the results of whatever has happened in our lives this year…To be a student of meditation is to take to heart that short-term fixes are usually illusions. To make real change, we need an actual path. Any genuine path takes time.  Most of the time, we simply want to practice more things than we can practice, take on more than we can take on, achieve more than is possible to achieve. This is especially true if you live in an exciting and overstimulating city. The wish to do more things than we can actually do comes from a positive place –  it’s because we love life, recognize impermanence and want to experience as much as we possibly can before it all slips on by. That’s why we end up doing WAY too many things and driving ourselves nuts with busy-ness. Sadly, when we try to do everything, we find ourselves doing much less than if we just took on a few things. 

Here’s the exercise in simplicity that I often introduce to students when I work with them closely. Let’s say that each day you can only do five things. Each of these five things must be done with the view of a practice, a process that we engage in to develop our heartminds and cultivate the qualities we want to embody in this precious and not-long-enough life of ours. You can only do five practices every day. Not six, not eight. Five.

Let’s assume for the purpose of this exercise that the basics – such as food, shelter, and medicine –  are all taken care of each day. Let’s assume that after that, you can do five things, each of which is viewed as a practice, which means each is a process where daily engagement in the process is considered more important than outcome. If you only had five practices for the fall, what would they be?

Ethan Nichtern, “A Meditation for the Fall”,  Huffington Post

An intimate awareness of an overall process

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Aware of my body, I breathe in. Relaxing my body, I breathe out.
Calming my body, I breathe in. Caring for my body, I breathe out

Thich Nhat Hahn

Breathing is the movement of life, the vital process that connects the body with its environment. The more we open and deepen awareness of the breath and the body, the m0re we understand the intrinsic dynamism of our entire experience. Nothing stands still for a moment. Breath, heartbeat, body, feelings, thoughts, environment are facts of an indivisible, interactive system, no part of which can really be claimed as “me” or “mine”

Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs.