Working with difficult moments – Page 23

Not getting carried away by the wind

April 5, 2011April 6, 2011 Karl Duffy1 Comment

The goal of attention, or shamatha, practice is to become aware of awareness. Awareness is the basis, or what you might call the “support,” of the mind. It is steady and unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached. When we recognize and become grounded in awareness, the “wind” of emotion may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward, watching the shifts and changes with the intention of becoming familiar with that aspect of consciousness that recognizes Oh, this is what I’m feeling, this is what I’m thinking. As we do so, a bit of space opens up within us. With practice, that space—which is the mind’s natural clarity—begins to expand and settle.

Yongey Mingpur Rinpoche

When we get hurt and damaged

April 4, 2011April 5, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Another post on working with the past. Typically, after tidying the garden over the weekend, the wind rose last night and scattered bins, leaves, twigs and nests, reminding us – and the birds – that it is not quite Summer, despite the warm temperatures. And coincidentally, the reading for today in Mark Nepo’s lovely book The Book of Awakening is about damage and hurt in our lives, so I thought I would share it here. Dealing with the past sometimes means moving on and letting go and at other times means healing what has been wounded or repairing what has been broken:

Stones loosened by storms cover paths, and uprooted trees break newly formed nests, and crisis after crisis throws us into each other. It is inevitable. Stay alive and you will be hurt, and you will also hurt others. Unintended hurt is as common as branches snapped in wind. But it is the unacknowledged hurt that becomes a wound.

Being human, we are subject to many ancient and powerful opposites found in life. Among those that impact us constantly are light and dark, yes and no, and especially fear and peace. For it is out of fear that we feel the need to isolate ourselves or to control others, and it is often in the act of elevating ourselves that we hurt one another, not to mention ourselves.

Still, as no one in daily life is exempt from both sleeping and waking, no one can escape feeling both fear and peace, and so, no one can escape being both hurtful and loving. But the world is kept whole by those who can overcome their fear, however briefly. The blood of life itself is kept vital by those who can simply and bravely repair their separations, time and time again.

Instead of trying to figure things out….

March 26, 2011March 26, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The practice of “letting go” is very effective for minds obsessed by compulsive thinking. You simplify your meditation practice down to just two words – letting go – rather than try to develop this practice and then develop that, and achieve this and go into that…. I did nothing but this for about two years – every time I tried to understand or figure things out, I’d say “let go, let go” until the desire would fade out. So I am making it very simple for you, to save you from getting caught in suffering.

Ajahn Sumedho

Are we the sum of our thoughts?

February 24, 2011November 22, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We usually take ourselves to be the sum of these thoughts, ideas, emotions and body sensations, but there is nothing solid to them. How can we claim to be our thoughts or opinions or emotions or body when they never stay the same?

Jack Kornfield

Teachers often suggest considering your thoughts to be like clouds in the sky. Some are dark and stormy, some are beautiful and fat, while others are wispy and ethereal. Sometimes there are no clouds at all. No matter. Just like clouds in the sky, thoughts pass through your mind. And just like the sky, your mind can contain it all.

Susan Piver

Working with our fears and not splitting

February 20, 2011February 21, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Mindfulness practice simplifies things, drawing together the scattered parts of our mind and our life and helping us in the process of integrating our lives. It does this by encouraging us to hold in awareness all the parts of our lives, even those things which we find frightening or threatening. We try to sit with events in our lives – or parts of our selves – that are difficult and then we work on the mind’s tendency to flee. It seems that personal growth happens more quickly if we are open to working with difficulties rather than trying to constantly run away from them. Mindfulness helps us to see that whenever we feel that we are really stuck, it is because we have not looked deeply enough into the nature of the experience.

However, this sounds much easier than it is, especially in times of crisis or when someone we are close to lets us down. It is in these moments when we feel overwhelmed, that we are most likely to judge ourselves or others most harshly. We have a tendency to identify with a difficulty and that affects how we see ourselves or how our life is going. One favoured way of dealing with feelings provoked by this is to split the world into “good” and “bad”, them and us, solidifying our sense of self, maximizing distance in order to increase a sense of safety. Splitting is an early defense mechanism which can be activated in response to a perceived threat, and means that any complexity in the situation or the person is not allowed. It is common in individuals whose early experiences meant that they did not form a healthy bond with their primary caregivers and thus have an impaired capacity to trust in adulthood. Because of this it is difficult for them to allow that other people are not always perfect and sometimes make mistakes. It means there is no grey area, histories are frozen into a moment and that moment defines the other person. We solidify the most negative core beliefs about ourselves or others and let them define our life, seeing it as threatened or hopeless. This causes a lot of difficulty in relationships as it tends to go hand in hand with intense anger and blaming.

Mindfulness practice can help us be aware of these defense mechanisms arising, see fear and anger forming, and help us to notice when the desire to withdraw appears, normally accompanied by a kind of defensive story-line. If we can spot this happening we may have enough of a gap to see the whole drama. If so, we can question what is feeling threatened, whether it is really actually me, or some story which I have about myself and my life. If we can resist the tendency to split or identify we can come to see that everything is workable. We can then experience for ourselves that it is ultimately possible to work with everything, and to keep a compassionate heart open to others and to all that occurs in our lives.

A practical way for working with strong emotions

February 18, 2011February 21, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Dense and intense emotional reactions can leave us feeling lost and overwhelmed. In these darkest moments, the practice is to bring awareness to the center of the chest, breathing the painful emotions, via the inbreath, directly into the heartspace. It’s as if we were breathing the swirling physical sensation right into the heart. Then, on the outbreath, we simply exhale. We are not trying to do or change anything; we’re simply allowing our heart center to become a wider container of awareness within which to experience distress.