Category: Working with difficult moments

Trust in the difficult

Karl Duffy1 Comment

People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. The future stands still, but we move in infinite space. How could it not be difficult for us? […]

And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Do not force things

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When there is sunshine,  it just shines across the land and it doesn’t try to  force the land to absorb its rays. The sun just shines. We too practice in a very non-violent, very loving way with our breathing. When you are sitting with a bent back you just recognise your back is bent and quite naturally your body adjusts itself to become a little straighter. There is no forcing. If you are agitated but you are mindful of this feeling of agitation you simply recognise,  ‘I have irritation.’ You should not say, ‘Irritation is very bad, I have to get rid of my irritation.’ No, you just be aware of your irritation. If there is irritation you simply recognise you have irritation.  You do not judge, you do not force, and you do not condemn them. You only look at your irritation with compassion. I go back to my body with non-violence, with care, with compassion.

When the sunshine falls on the vegetation, the vegetation itself becomes green. When your mindfulness is shining upon what is happening in you,  then you do not need to force but you know right away and you smile with compassion to your irritation and then your irritation will disappear. You know that everything changes including your irritation. If you are aware then your irritation becomes weaker, but if you are not aware then the irritation can grow very fast turning into anger and stress, and other negative feelings. If you are aware, it will weaken naturally, because it is impermanent.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Poisoning ourselves: Continually judging

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Feeling that we are continually falling short

is like a toxic gas we breathe,

making it difficult to be truly intimate with others

and at home in our body, mind and heart.

Tara Brach.

……and not judging it

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As I have said, nothing that arises in our body and in our life happens outside of our journey, of our path, to full realization.  Everything that occurs needs to be welcomed with an attitude of acceptance and openness. No matter what happens, it is imperative that we do not judge it. Especially when we are going through very difficult and trying circumstances, one cannot repeat to oneself too often, “Do not judge it; do not judge it.” Only when we resist the temptation to judge what we are going through can the journey we need to make at this moment continue to unfold, and can we receive the needed development and transformation it may bring.

Reginald Ray, Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body.

Working with all our entanglements

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A question that has intrigued me for years is this: How can we start exactly where we are, with all our entanglements, and still develop unconditional acceptance of ourselves instead of guilt and depression? One of the most helpful methods I’ve found is the practice of compassionate abiding. This is a way of bringing warmth to unwanted feelings. It is a direct method for embracing our experience rather than rejecting it. So the next time you realize that you’re hooked — that you’re stuck, finding yourself tightening, spiraling into blaming, acting out, obsessing — you could experiment with this approach.

Contacting the experience of being hooked, you breathe in, allowing the feeling completely and opening to it. The in-breath can be deep and relaxed — anything that helps you to let the feeling be there, anything that helps you not push it away. Then, still abiding with the urge and edginess of feelings such as craving or aggression, as you breathe out you relax and give the feeling space. The outbreath is not a way of sending the discomfort away but a way of ventilating it, of loosening the tension around it, of becoming aware of the space in which the discomfort is occurring.

Pema Chodron, Three Steps to Genuine Compassion

Allowing emotions, not running from them

Karl Duffy1 Comment

One or two posts these days on how to work with difficult and frightening emotions: Awareness is the key to living fully in each moment, even if the moment contains difficult emotions. It is the same practice  – insofar as it is possible – to spend time with and hold emotions in a non-judgmental awareness without making them into a statement about ourselves or the direction of our lives. Gentleness, kindness and self-compassion are the key to this work, leading to a genuine friendliness toward ourselves and towards whatever passes through the body-mind.

With radical accountability, all emotions are observed as experiences only, pointing nowhere, implicating no one and signifying nothing. Though it is no one’s fault that we have an emotion, it is still essential to hold the emotion fully within awareness without wavering. Emotions need observation and allowance, not our analysis or fixation. The story that accompanies the emotion dies with accountability. The story was never true to begin with; we needed it to provide relief from the pain of being “me”. Though we did not know it at the time, sustaining the story’s untruth through inattention was causing even greater suffering than if we had allowed the pain to express itself in awareness. Radical accountability allows all experience to be itself. 

Rodney Smith, Stepping out of Self-Deception