Category: Meditation

Emptying ourselves to leave space for wisdom

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

This beautiful quotation from French Philosopher, Simone Weil, could be describing the practice of mindfulness, with its emphasis on the need to move away from just thinking and opening to a wider attention. By paying atttention, even to the simplest details of each day, we create space for a deeper wisdom to grow.

As long as a person tolerates having his inner self full of his own thoughts, of his personal thoughts, he is entirely submitted  –  even in his most intimate thoughts –  to the constraint of needs and the mechanical play of force.  But everything changes when, by virtue of real attention, he empties his soul to let the thoughts of eternal wisdom pass through it. He then carries in himself the very thoughts to which force is submitted.

Simone Weil

Just observe and stay open

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Here, Ajahn Sumedho explains meditation so well –  in a beautifully straightforward manner – that nothing needs to be added. The words are, at the same time,  both simple and profound. It is an overall explanation but also a practical guide. However, our habitual desire  to fix ourselves and change our life circumstances make it more complicated than it needs to be. We seem afraid to believe that the goal we are seeking lies in simply  relating to our life directly, without judgement, just as we find it, moment to moment.  Can you –  today – allow things to be what they are?

For many people the attitude towards meditation is one of always trying to change something, always trying to attain a particular state or recreate some kind of blissful experience remembered from the past, or of hoping to reach a certain state by practising. When we practise meditation with the idea of having to do something, however, then even the idea of practice ― even the word ‘meditation’ ― will bring up this idea that ‘if I’m in a bad mood, I should get rid of it’, or ‘if the mind is scattered and I’m all over the place, I should make it one-pointed’. In other words, we make meditation into hard work.  So then there is a great deal of failure in it because we try to control everything through these ideas.

The goal of meditation is to see things as they are; it is a state of awakened attention. And this is a very simple thing. It isn’t complicated or difficult or something that takes years to achieve. It is so easy, in fact, that you don’t even notice it. When you think in terms of having to practise meditation, you are conceiving it as something you have to attain …….. you have to control your emotions, you have to develop virtues in order to attain some kind of ideal state of mind. You might have images of a lot of yogis sitting in remote places on mountain tops and in caves. ….. and it all sounds very remote and very far from what you can expect from your life as a human being. The point is to look at meditation as awakenedness and awareness throughout daily life in whatever way we live and in whatever conditions. There is in that the sense of allowing things to be in this present moment, allowing whatever way the body is or the emotional and mental states right now to be the way they are. Just be the observer of whatever is. Right now the mood is ‘this’, ‘I feel this’. Just be aware whether you are confused, indifferent, happy, sad, uncertain or whatever. Be that which allows things to be what they are.

Ajahn Sumedho

Being spacious

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.

Sogyal Rinpoche

Trying to find happiness in the wrong way

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

I think it’s odd for people to say, “I meditate,” or “I don’t meditate.” It’s like saying either you work with your mind or you don’t. The reality is that whether or not we are working with our mind in formal meditation, one way or another we are always working with our mind. Most of the time we’re using it to meditate on “me.” We’re using it to become familiar with our immediate reactions to the world around us. Somebody has something we want, so we “meditate” on jealousy. We don’t get something we want, or we do get something we don’t want, so we “meditate” on anger. Our root meditation is, “What about me? Will I get what I want today?” Our mind is continuously chasing itself around, trying to secure happiness in all the wrong ways. Its speed and reactivity keep us under siege. There’s so little space that by the end of the day we feel physically exhausted. We are drained by our continual meditation on the mental fabrication known as “me.”

Meditation is about taming our mind by engaging our mind, with enthusiasm and inspiration. With practice we become grounded in the experience of basic goodness. This leads us toward a healthy sense of self.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

A friendly space for all experience

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Mindfulness practice allows us to create a more spacious mind when we’re actually involved in our walking-around activities. This gives us that ability to actually check-in with our subjective experience, instead of just reacting out of our subjective experience….. it actually kind of stops you in your tracks; and you can have this “holding” of your own experience where you can continue to experience without doing the verbal or nonverbal or emotional reactivity that people do place on each other. It allows you to be able to have your own experience; and then a bit of freedom to respond to whatever is going on.

So here’s a definition of mindfulness: it’s a strengthening of your concentration so that you can be more precise and clear in recognizing your experience. It’s also a strengthening of your equanimity — your ability to be relaxed and open in the face of your experience. The concentration part of mindfulness is a little like drinking a cup of coffee; it kind of wakes you up. It’s like the straight spine of arousal or awareness. The equanimity part is like the relaxed limbs of the body. The spine is straight, and the limbs are relaxed. This relaxation part is a receptivity and acceptance to things as they are. It’s a kind of “friendly audience” to your own experience; a sort of “Hello. Wow! OK.” attitude — a gentle, matter-of-fact awareness of your experience, rather than a reactive pulling back.  All mindfulness practices cultivate both of those, the concentration and the equanimity, so that you can be clearer, more precise and more relaxed in the face of whatever is happening to you —whether it’s loud noises coming in from a jackhammer running in the next building, or a pain in your knee, or your emotions about your spouse.

Polly Young-Eisendrath

Starting with the now

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Meditation begins now, right here.  If you wish to free yourself from the frantic television mind that runs our lives, begin with the intention to be present now. Nobody can bring awareness to your life but you.

Meditation is not a self-help program – a way to better ourselves so we can get what we want.  Nor is it a way to relax before jumping back into busyness. It’s not something to do once in a while, either, whenever you happen to feel like it.  Instead, meditation is a practice that saturates your life and in time can be brought into every activity. It is the transformation of mind from bondage to freedom. In practicing meditation, we go nowhere other than right here where we now stand, where we now sit, where we now live and breathe. In meditation we return to where we already are – this shifting, changing ever-present now.

Steve Hagen