On one of the days last week the blog welcomed its 100,000 visitor. It is not a huge number in terms of the big blogs out there and greater numbers say nothing about mindful living in this modern age as we are continually challenged to switch off and allow space for reflection and non-action in the face of more and more technology usage. However, my intention is quite simple: To be a small support on any one day to any reader who is trying to move towards more mindful living, or to even one visitor who may be struggling with life’s challenges. So, I am happy if some of the posts may be of help to some of you who stop by from time to time and those whose visit regularly. I would like to take the opportunity to use the traditional Irish greeting – Céad míle fáilte, A hundred thousand welcomes – to all who visit and to thank everyone for their readership and comments, support, practice and presence.
Category: Meditation
The mind needs training too
The Tibetan word for meditation is “gom”. It essentially means “getting used to, familiarizing”. Meditation, then, is the act of familiarizing your mind with what you want it to do. That process fo familiarity is just taking qualities and abilities that the mind naturally has, focusing on them in a methodical way, and thus building your base. The bones and tendons of the mind are mindfulness and awareness. Mindfulness is the mind’s strength and awareness is its flexibility. Without these abilities we cannot function. When we drink a glass of water, drive a car or have a conversation, we are using mindfulness and awareness. Unless we train it, the mind does the minimum necessary to fulfill a function. in that way it is like the body.…Without conditioning, even a sudden dash to keep our kids out of harm’s way – or to catch a plane or a bus – will tire us out.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Running with the mind of meditation.
Finding serenity within
The nature of the mind is comparable to the ocean.
The incessant movement of waves on the surface of the ocean prevents us from seeing its depths.
If we dive down there are no more waves;
there is just the immense serenity of the depths….
Pema Wangyal Rinpoche
Let go of the small sense of self.
Meditation comes alive through a growing capacity to release our habitual entanglement in the stories and plans, conflicts and worries that make up the small sense of self, and to rest in awareness. In meditation we do this simply by acknowledging the moment-to-moment changing conditions — the pleasure and pain, the praise and blame, the litany of ideas and expectations that arise. Without identifying with them, we can rest in the awareness itself, beyond conditions, and experience what my teacher Ajahn Chah called jai pongsai, our natural lightness of heart. Developing this capacity to rest in awareness nourishes samadhi (concentration), which stabilizes and clarifies the mind, and prajna (wisdom), that sees things as they are.
Jack Kornfield, A Mind like Sky: Wise Attention, Open Awareness.
Why stillness is difficult, and movement is easy
A central ingredient in most forms of practice is stillness…. [But…] It takes time to really see that thoughts and emotions are mere movements of the mind. They are, after all, the fabric of who we think we are, and everything we do is an expression of thought and emotion. We take them so seriously. But take a closer look, test this against your own experience, and see for yourself. If we can gain this recognition, we are on our way to freedom, for instead of being sucked into the contents of our mind and acting out everything that arises within it, we will watch those contents melt like snowflakes on a hot rock.
According to the Bon tradition… we have about eighty thousand thoughts a day, which means the mind moves eighty thousand times a day. We can feel the velocity of this movement within the first five minutes of sitting meditation. This discovery then leads to the next: the voluntary and involuntary movements that constitute our life are just the mental extensions of the voluntary and involuntary movements of our mind. We move physically because we move mentally. Our fundamental addiction to movement, therefore, is habituation to the movement of mind. We are addicted to thought.
Andrew Holecek, The Power and the Pain.
Still water
We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight
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