Category: Meditation

How we speak to ourselves

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

I tell mindfulness practitioners to listen to the tone their inner voice uses to comment on their experience. I ask them to consider whether, if they had a friend who spoke that way, they would keep that friend.

The moment in which people discover they are not holding themselves in compassion, not speaking kindly, is often startling and always sad. That awareness is sometimes enough to cause the critic’s voice to soften, and the soother’s voice to be heard.

Sylvia Boorstein, I’m Not ok, you’re not ok  – and thats ok

Just do it

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The biggest obstacle to establishing a meditation practice is the erroneous idea that meditation should calm and focus the mind.  Better to assume the attitude that meditation is what you do when you meditate.

There is no doing it right or wrong.

Norman Fischer

Seeing people and things without labels

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Imagine how it might feel to suspend all your judging and instead to let each moment be just as it is, without attempting to evaluate it as “good” or “bad.” This would be a true stillness, a true liberation. This means cultivating a non-judging attitude toward what comes up in the mind, come what may.

Jon Kabat Zinn

the mind is always judging

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The habit of judging our experience locks us into mechanical reactions that we are not even aware of and that often have no objective basis at all. These judgments tend to dominate our minds making it difficult to find any peace wihin ourselves.

It is as if the mind were a yo-yo going up and down on the string of our own judging thoughts all day long.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Not going anywhere…..

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment.

It’s not about getting somewhere else,  but about allowing yourself to be where you already are.

Jon Kabat Zinn,  Wherever you go, there you are

Let each moment be

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Imagine how it might feel to suspend all your judging and instead to let each moment be just as it is, without attempting to evaluate it as “good” or “bad.” This would be a true stillness, a true liberation.

Meditation means cultivating a non-judging attitude toward what comes up in the mind, come what may.

Jon Kabat Zinn