Tag: Acceptance

Roots in the past 2: Suffering has an internal cause

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Suffering comes from how the mind interacts with pain. Because your mind is conditioned by past life events, when it encounters an experience it perceives as painful or unpleasant, there is immediate and direct suffering that is far greater than the actual discomfort of the situation. The increased discomfort happens in your mind, not in the actual experience. This means suffering has an internal cause, and you therefore have the ability to affect how much you suffer – you can dance with life and be a partner in how your life unfolds. With mindfulness of the cause of suffering, what is unpleasant simply remains unpleasant, even though it is not your preference.

Philip Moffitt, Dancing with Life

A friendly space for all experience

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Mindfulness practice allows us to create a more spacious mind when we’re actually involved in our walking-around activities. This gives us that ability to actually check-in with our subjective experience, instead of just reacting out of our subjective experience….. it actually kind of stops you in your tracks; and you can have this “holding” of your own experience where you can continue to experience without doing the verbal or nonverbal or emotional reactivity that people do place on each other. It allows you to be able to have your own experience; and then a bit of freedom to respond to whatever is going on.

So here’s a definition of mindfulness: it’s a strengthening of your concentration so that you can be more precise and clear in recognizing your experience. It’s also a strengthening of your equanimity — your ability to be relaxed and open in the face of your experience. The concentration part of mindfulness is a little like drinking a cup of coffee; it kind of wakes you up. It’s like the straight spine of arousal or awareness. The equanimity part is like the relaxed limbs of the body. The spine is straight, and the limbs are relaxed. This relaxation part is a receptivity and acceptance to things as they are. It’s a kind of “friendly audience” to your own experience; a sort of “Hello. Wow! OK.” attitude — a gentle, matter-of-fact awareness of your experience, rather than a reactive pulling back.  All mindfulness practices cultivate both of those, the concentration and the equanimity, so that you can be clearer, more precise and more relaxed in the face of whatever is happening to you —whether it’s loud noises coming in from a jackhammer running in the next building, or a pain in your knee, or your emotions about your spouse.

Polly Young-Eisendrath

Some practical advice for living

Karl Duffy1 Comment

All the different wisdom traditions have the same message. And yet sometimes when we read these texts we see them as eternal laws, impacting sometime in the future, without realizing that they are giving practical guidelines about happiness, and how to live right now, moment by moment.  The conditions for real contentment are fully present in our life now, if we can just notice.  We have such a strong desire to control, and our fears about not being in control are so strong, that we frequently  fall into the trap of believing that we will gain security by  thinking excessively about situations. Texts like this remind us of a different strategy towards happiness.  These simple flowers that I saw in in the field today remind me. There is a rhythm deep down in nature. We can trust and let go.

Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?

Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?

Luke 12:25f

Is worrying helping?

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If you can solve your problem, then what is the need of worrying?

If you cannot solve it, then what is the use of worrying?

Shantideva

How you talk to yourself

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Your way of explaining events to yourself determines how helpless you can become, or how energized, when you encounter the everyday setbacks as well as momentous defeats.

Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism

Don’t solidify your emotions into who you are

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Through tuning in to the steady flow of the body’s in- and out-breathing, how we actually are gets to feel good. With a steady bodily presence to relate to, the heart sense doesn’t get wound up in its emotions, and how we are doesn’t solidify into who I really am. And this is good news. Because then there can be empathy with others rather than projections and reactions. We’re less needy and therefore less disappointed by other people being the way they are. There is presence, empathy and clear thinking, and they support each other. That’s enough.

Ajahn Sucitto