Category: Working with difficult moments

Not feeding the problem

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Let’s go back to our experience-body, focus on it, and let things happen within that focus, without pushing or trying to find anything, or come to a conclusion. In that context, when we come out of wanting anything to happen, there’s some spaciousness – and when a feeling comes up, try to attune to that spaciousness. Develop an attitude and energy of not-feeding, demanding, pushing away, skipping off or proliferation around the feeling. This is nonattachment. By practicing in this way we realize that for these few moments we don’t have to solve the problems of existence, or know who we are,  or what we’re going to do.

Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

Sunshine after a cloudy weekend: The parts of a life

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Perhaps there is more understanding and beauty in life when the glaring sunlight is softened by the patterns of shadows. Perhaps there is more depth in a relationship that has weathered some storms. Experience that never disappoints or saddens or stirs up feeling is a bland experience with little challenge or variation of color. Perhaps it’s when we experience confidence and faith and hope that we see materialize before our eyes this builds up within us a feeling of inner strength, courage, and security. We are all personalities that grow and develop as a result of our experiences, relationships, thoughts, and emotions. We are the sum total of all the parts that go into the making of a life.

Virginia Axline, Dibs, In Search of Self

A way to claim courage

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The on-the-spot practice of being fully present, feeling your heart and greeting the next moment with an open mind can be done at any time: when you wake up in the morning, before a difficulty conversation, whenever fear or discomfort arises. This practice is a beautiful way to claim… your courage, your kindness, your kindness, your strength. Whenever it occurs to you, you can pause briefly, touch in with how you’re feeling both physically and mentally, and then connect with your heart – even putting your hand on your heart if you want to. This is a way of extending warmth and acceptance to whatever is going on for you right now.

Pema Chodron, Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change

To name is to tame

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Tiger-forest v3Whatever is newly born needs a name and when we are more and more  welcomed by the silence, naming becomes our job . We have to notice, to bless with attention the beasts before us, both the rough and the smooth. To name is to bring an attitude of wonder to the work of sorting, and even to the work of dealing with difficult states of mind. When we can name what is happening to us, we are no longer fully identified with it and have begun to separate from the grasping dark. If what we feel is known and named to be a tiger, then the whole world is not tiger. We can divide the compulsion and the image, the action and the emotion. There is a landscape through which we move, trees casting their own stripes on the forest floor, places where tiger is not.

John Tarrant, The Light inside the Dark

Notice judging and blaming

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Our most direct way of promoting healing and peace is to become mindful of our habits of judging and blaming. It is a brave activity, because to do this we must let go of our most familiar, comfortable reference points. In the moment of releasing blame, we step out of the story of self and other, the story of good self and bad self, and discover the spaciousness and tenderness of being alive. Blaming distances while acceptance connects.  When we let go of blame, we open to the compassion that can genuinely transform ourselves and our world.

Tara Brach, Creating Peace by letting go of Blame

How to work when the strong reactions are triggered…

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Many of us reserve our deepest blame for ourselves. If instead, we can accept our experience with kindness, we begin to break the inner cycle of violence. This doesn’t mean we give ourselves permission to continue to act in harmful ways. But we don’t condemn ourselves either. Instead, we identify exactly what we’re feeling in the moment — physical discomfort, shame, remorse — and meet our experience with a kind attention.  As we do so, our sense of identity grows beyond a “flawed” self, and we begin to trust our essence as compassionate awareness.  We gradually become more responsible — more able to respond wisely to our present circumstances.

Tara Brach, Creating Peace by letting go of Blame