Meditation – Page 31 – Mindfulbalance

As close to real as we can be

October 5, 2010 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Things that are real pose no danger to the mind. The real dangers in the mind are our delusions, the things we make up, the things we use to cover up reality, the stories, the preconceived notions we impose on things. When we’re trying to live in those stories and notions, reality is threatening. It’s always exposing the cracks in our ideas, the cracks in our ignorance, the cracks in our desires. As long as we identify with those make-believe desires, we find that threatening. But if we learn to become real people ourselves, then reality poses no dangers.

This is what the meditation is for, teaching yourself how to be real, to get in touch with what’s really going on, to look at your sense of who you are and take it apart in terms of what it really is, to look at the things that you find threatening in your life and see what they really are. When you really look, you see the truth. If you’re true in your looking, the truth appears.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Clearly seeing absolute and relative

September 28, 2010September 28, 2010 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The practice of meditation leads us to seeing things as they really are. In other words, we come to appreciate the continual changing nature of things as they are directly experienced in the present, the patterns which are beneath our choices, and the way we react, without thinking, to certain factors. When we do not see clearly the nature of what drives us and the nature of reality as changing, we seek happiness in mistaken ways and in the wrong places. We can persist in unsatisfactory ways of behaving. When we have a “wrong view” as to how things are, we persist in thinking that certain behaviours will guarantee us satisfaction and we remain fixed in them. We mistakenly believe that absolute contentment can be found in things that we acquire or in the relative aspects of our lives which are subject to change and decay. This can be true in so many areas of our lives, some of which are hugely emphasized in today’s society, such as our career, possessions and our relationships.

Ordinary human love is always relative, never consistently absolute. Like the weather it is always in continual dynamic flux. It is continually rising and subsiding, waxing and waning, changing shape and intensity.

….This may seem totally obvious. Yet here’s the rub. We imagine that others – surely someone out there! – should be a source of perfect love by consistently loving us in just the right way. Since our first experiences of love usually happen in relationship to other people, we naturally come to regard relationship as its main source. Then when relationships fail to deliver the ideal love we dream of, we imagine something has gone seriously wrong. And this disappointed hope keeps reactivating the wound of the heart and generating grievance against others. This is why the first step in healing the wound and freeing ourselves from grievance is to appreciate the important difference between absolute and relative love.

John Welwood, Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships

A Time for Resting

September 24, 2010September 24, 2010 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Normally the mind is a whirlwind of thought, and meditation is a practice that calms this down and helps us develop a peaceful state of mind. Not only is our mind busy thinking, we’re usually thinking about the past or the future. We’re either reliving old dramas or imagining what could happen tomorrow or in ten years and trying to plan for it. We usually aren’t experiencing the present moment at all. We can’t change the past, and the future is always ahead of us — we never reach it, have you ever noticed? So, as long as this process continues, our mind never comes to rest. The mind can never just settle down and feel at ease.

When we practice sitting meditation over time, we get better at catching our thoughts and releasing them. Gradually the mind begins to settle naturally into a resting state. This is great because it allows us to be fully present in our lives. When we aren’t being pulled into the past or future, we can just be right here, where we actually live. To be in the present moment simply means to be awake and aware of yourself and your surroundings. That‘s the beginning of peace and contentment.

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

Allowing ourselves some quiet in our busy lives

September 21, 2010September 24, 2010 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Finding quiet time isn’t a luxury; it’s essential for protecting our health. It allows us to rest the body and the mind in a world that increasingly values speed and distraction.

After a pebble touches the surface of the river, it allows itself to sink slowly. It will reach the bed of the river without any effort. Once the pebble is at the bottom of the river, it continues to rest. It allows the water to pass by.

I think the pebble reaches the bed of the river by the shortest path because
it allows itself to fall without making any effort. During our sitting meditation we can allow ourselves to rest like a pebble. We can allow ourselves to sink naturally without
effort to the position of sitting, the position of resting.

Resting is a very important practice; we have to learn the art of resting. Resting is the first part of meditation. You should allow your body and your mind to rest. Our mind as well as our body needs to rest. The problem is that not many of us know how to allow our body and mind to rest. We are always struggling; struggling has
become a kind of habit.

When an animal in the jungle is wounded, it knows how to find a quiet place, lie down and do nothing. The animal knows that is the only way to get healed-to lay down and just rest, not thinking of anything, including hunting and eating. What it needs is to rest, to do nothing, and that is why its health is restored. In our consciousness there are wounds also, lots of pains. Our consciousness also needs to rest in order to restore itself. Our consciousness is just like our body. Our body knows how to heal itself if we allow it the chance to do so.

Thich Nhat Hahn

It’s not out there

September 6, 2010September 6, 2010 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We have a habit of looking in the wrong place for contentment. We tend to look outside ourselves, seeing others’ lives and other places as possessing a greater level of happiness than we currently possess. This often leads us to instinctively compare, provoking a movement within us that happens in a flash and then prompts the telling of a story about ourselves and about life, which leads to our mood going down. As I have written before, we end up comparing our present self to a better self, or to the ideal portrayal of lives which we find in society or which our insecurities about ourselves have generated. We find that a lot of our anxieties arise because we are trying to match up to what we think our life “should” be like, or what others portray as being happy.

It is easy to fall into this trap when we travel. We see a different from of life, maybe faster and more “exciting” than our own, or houses situated in a better location, or places of quiet that seem much more peaceful than where we live. So we lean towards those things, or we leave ourselves, not realizing that true contentment is found within. We get caught in idealized views of what is possible for ourselves and travel far in our minds and in our spirits from where we actually are. And this often means we end up thinking that something must be wrong with our lives or with us.

Meditation practice is a training in learning to stay, staying with ourselves, not running outside ourselves after every passing stimulus about things which will pass away. It helps us to not attach too much solidity to these comparing thoughts, letting them pass through our minds without hooking on to them. We realize that they do not bring the contentment they seem to suggest. It helps us seek real happiness within, where we already are.

The primary focus of this path of choosing wisely…is learning to stay present. Pausing very briefly, frequently throughout the day, is an almost effortless way to do this. For just a few seconds we can be right here. Meditation is another way to train in learning to stay or…learning to come back, to return to the present over and over again.

Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap