Acceptance – Page 100 – Mindfulbalance

Getting places, despite our fears

February 23, 2012February 26, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

We could summarize the whole path into one word: relaxing – relaxing into the nature of your own mind. However when we start to relax, the repressed elements of the body/mind come up – it is like a Pandora’s Box. We discover there is a reason we repressed those elements in the first place – we did not want to deal with them. Meditation gives us a second chance to relate to unwanted experience in a healthy way based on equanimity and acceptance. These “regressive” elements, such as your life falling apart, can be good news. You are starting to get someplace when you come up against barriers of fear and anxiety. What we have been doing in these situations our entire life is running away from them…What is continually whispered into the subconscious mind is to avoid fear at all cost. Unless we address that fear, everything we do is fear-based. Actually, fear is the indicator of where we should go in order to grow. …We spend our entire lives running from this emotion. We need to get to know it, make friends with it. The root of the word fear is “fare”, a toll. Facing fear is the toll we have to pay to become fearless.

Andrew Holocek, Good News: Your Life is Falling Apart.

The one who knows

February 21, 2012February 19, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

Every time I reacted negatively, pushing things away, that action implied that there was something to fear. That this feeling or this thought was dangerous; that it was going to really hurt me, or invade me; that it was something that was really me and mine. As I began to welcome it all I realised that when you accept everything, only then can you sense that, after all, there is nothing to fear. None of it really belongs to a self or comes from a self. It cannot touch the mind which knows, cannot affect its nature. Whatever shape of vessel you pour the water into, with this same total accommodation, the water changes to the shape of the bottle. It doesn’t say: ‘I will not be poured into a square bottle, square bottles are not my scene. Round bottles only, please!’ When there is complete acceptance, there is just the sense of being the knowing, being that which is aware of all that comes through the mind.

Ajahn Amaro

Why we should take ourselves lightly

February 20, 2012February 21, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

We often think that the way forward lies in us putting a lot of work into our life, hoping to improve and fix what we do not like. And we can bring that attitude to meditation also, seeing it as something I am doing, and something I have got to do. However, just as one of the big problems in meditation is that we can take ourselves too seriously, we also need to realize that a big step towards contentment lies in letting some things go or not holding on too tightly to the succession of energies that appear in the mind, both positive “improving” ones as well as the ones that are arise from difficult events or people. Now to say this sounds quite simple. But the tendency of the mind is to hold onto most things and make them into problems. We don’t have the faith or the trust or the willingness to just totally let go in the moment, to allow things pass through lightly, rather than amplifying them and making them into a story about our value or our life. Where meditation helps is in coming to see that the mind is continually generating stories and fears, and that holding one to every one can become quite tiring. Letting go our our inflated sense of the importance of our dramas can be liberating. The image in this poem may help – as a way of dealing with thoughts in meditation, as a way of dealing with our preoccupation with “me” and “I”, as a way of dealing with our tendency to improve and fix and fret.

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“don’t love your life
too much,” it said,
and vanished into the world.

Mary Oliver, One or Two Things

Staying with where our life is at this moment

February 20, 2012February 19, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Consciously or unconsciously,

we avoid facing things as they are in themselves

and so we want God to open for us a door which is beyond…

(But) to find life’s purpose we must go through the door of ourselves.

Krishnamurti

Standing still and withdrawing your consent to fear

February 19, 2012February 19, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

In our practice we cultivate awareness – the capacity to hold even the events and thoughts and fears that bother us with kindness and non-judgment. This means, as Christine Feldman tells us here, that we create enough of a gap between us and our fears that we no longer allow them to define our sense of self, or let them mean that we are doing something wrong:

It is a great relief to stop running from pain. In standing still and receiving life with all its adversity and sorrow, you have withdrawn your permission for suffering to define your life. You have also withdrawn your consent to living in fear. Something profound happens in your heart when you turn with kindness toward all the circumstances of pain which you have previously repressed, dismissed or fled from. There is a softening, an opening, a deepening capacity and willingness to understand sorrow and its cause. You come to understand that your willingness to be present with difficulties is the midwife to compassion.

Christine Feldman, Compassion