Tag: Awareness

A natural lightness of heart

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Meditation comes alive through a growing capacity to release our habitual entanglement in the stories and plans, conflicts and worries that make up the small sense of self, and to rest in awareness. In meditation we do this simply by acknowledging the moment-to-moment changing conditions—the pleasure and pain, the praise and blame, the litany of ideas and expectations that arise. Without identifying with them, we can rest in the awareness itself, beyond conditions, and experience what my teacher Ajahn Chah called jai pongsai, our natural lightness of heart.

Jack Kornfield, A Mind like Sky: Wise Attention, Open Awareness

 

What we think we know

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Instead of building bigger or fancier boxes, we need to develop the antidote to all our partial views of reality: being present with our experience as it is. This is unconditional presence. We could also call it beginner’s mind. As Suzuki Roshi put it, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.” We have all become experts at being ourselves, and in so doing we have lost our ability to be present with our experience in a fresh, open-minded way. Beginner’s mind is a willingness to meet whatever arises freshly, without holding to any fixed idea about what it means or how it should unfold.

John Welwood, Towards a Psychology of Awakening

Resting the mind

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Sometimes you may think that to sit is very difficult. But when you are able to stop and be at peace it is very easy…While sitting I make almost no use of my intellect. I don’t try to analyze things or solve complex problems by thinking about them. Thinking requires strenuous mental work and makes us tired. This is not the case while resting in awareness, or recognizing thoughts and emotions as they appear, or even taking the time to look deeply into them. We have a tendency to think that meditation demands a great mobilization of grey matter, but that’s not really the case.  Meditation is not hard labour.  Meditation rests the mind

Thich Nhat Hahn, Making Space: Creating a Home Meditation Practice

In meditation as in life

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So much of what is involved in meditation instruction is a matter of finding ways to keep it simple. Everyone knows how to breathe: anyone can feel the breath as it fills the chest and moves it in and out of the nose. It’s like climbing stairs. We all know how to take that first step; what is not so easy is taking one step after another after another, especially since in our practice the staircase is never-ending and we can’t be sure where it leads. Yet at each step, all we have to do is take the next step, the next breath.

Barry Magid, Ending the pursuit of Happiness

The simple nature of practice

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

One way to bring the mind into the present – to ground ourselves in basic meditation – is to meditate on the body and the breath. We can do this whenever we get lost or carried away by thoughts or feelings: just remember, I’m still breathing, the body is still here. That will ground you. It will establish mindfulness in the present. Emotionally we can resist this simple practice. Maybe we’re looking for something else. It doesn’t seem important enough just to reflect on the breath, on our posture, or on the feeling of the body as it is; we tend to dismiss them. But I encourage you to have complete faith in this practice of “just the present moment,” just what’s happening with the breath and with the body.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Bearable Irritation of Being

A sense of space

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The key thing here is, try not to watch the breath, but try feeling it go in and out, so you feel one with the breath. Just see if from the beginning you can minimize that sense of heavy-duty watching it, and just feel the breath going in and out. …. Then start to emphasize the outwardness and the space that the breath goes into, and emphasize that more and more. And then just see if you can let that sense of outwardness and space begin to pervade the whole practice more and more.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche