Tag: Awareness

Recognizing your experience

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Looking Outside

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

Simplify the production

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File:Production of the Regina Operatic Society at the Regina Theatre.jpg
Mindfulness, seeing clearly, means awakening to the happiness of the uncomplicated moment. We complicate moments. Hardly anything happens without the mind spinning it up into an elaborate production.

It’s the elaboration that makes life more difficult than it needs to be.

Sylvia Boorstein

Not being fixed

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Open door - geograph.org.uk - 798005.jpg

When one door of happiness closes, another opens,

but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.

Helen Keller

Noticing simple things

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Flowingtap.jpg

By taking a moment to pay attention to something as simple as turning on the water tap, we give ourselves the opportunity to be aware of how things in our lives come, go, and transform, which makes us less likely to take them for granted.  Instead, we can, for even a moment, be awake to the transitory blessing they are.  And, certainly, we can carry this habit out into the larger world, applying it to whatever we find ourselves doing or encountering.

Turning on the Water:  Water flows from high mountain sources.

Water runs deep in the Earth.

Miraculously, water comes to us and sustains all life.

Thich Nhat Hanh

photo thegreenj

The real work

Karl Duffy2 Comments

boat dunmore

And I am thinking:

maybe just looking and listening is the real work.

Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem.  

Mary Oliver

Which myth we live by

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 File:Obilisk and gravestones of the Big Church in Templemore.JPG

It is clear that many things have changed in Ireland in the time I have been abroad, such as the confidence placed in institutional elements such as government, banking and most especially the church. However, we never really get rid of our guiding myths, just simply replace them with others – new populist ideologies, fads and obsessions with fashions and celebrity leaders – which play a similar role.

The crises of the world are not just “out there” in the geopolitical sphere but “in here” in the individual soul. The questions, explanations and great rhythms that once guided the soul by way of living myth are still within us, still guiding our lives. And we are obliged to render this process more conscious lest we live blindly, false to ourselves and false to nature. . . . we must more consciously create our own myth or be enslaved to the myth of another.

James Hollis, Tracking the gods

photo Templemore abbey, Laurel Lodged