Tag: Awareness

Our primary connection to life

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With our mobile phones and wireless devices, we are now able to be so connected that we can be in touch with anyone and everyone at any time, and do business anywhere. But have you noticed that, in the process, we run the risk of never being in touch with ourselves? In the overall seduction, we can easily forget that our primary connection to life is through our own interiority – the experiencing of our own body and all our senses, including the mind –  which allow us to touch and be touched by the world, and to act appropriately in response to it. And for that, we need moments that are not filled with anything, in which we do not jump to get in one more phone call or send one more email, or plan one more event, or add to our to-do list.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Letting yourself be

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Meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment.

It’s not about getting somewhere else,  but about allowing yourself to be where you already are.

Jon Kabat Zinn,  Wherever you go, there you are

A simple practice for working with fears

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Just the wind blowing: allowing life to move through this moment:

Take a comfortable position,

Now imagine you are in a beautiful place in nature. Surrounded by beauty you can feel the wind blowing around you

Let all of your conscious experience — sounds, sensations, thoughts, emotions, everything — become the wind.

Feel all of it moving and changing, arriving, moving around and over you, and then going.

Notice how the wind takes on different qualities — soft, strong, harsh, gusty, gentle.

Relax as the wind blows around you.

Let it come and go in all its forms. You remain here, in calmness, abiding.

Jeffrey Brantley  and Wendy Millstine, Daily Mediations for Calming Your Anxious Mind,

Our real prayer

Karl Duffy3 Comments

For my wife, on our anniversary

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes.  Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here.  And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear.  What we need is here.

Wendell Berry

Waking up

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Our minds are such that we are often more asleep than awake

to the unique beauty and possibilities

of each present moment as it unfolds.

Jon Kabat Zinn

The depth beneath our thoughts.

Karl Duffy1 Comment

In 1929 the British Broad­casting Corporation decided to start broadcasting “live silence” in memory of the dead instead of just halting transmission for two minutes every day; it was important, it was felt, to hear the rustle of papers, the singing of the birds outside, an occasional cough. As a BBC spokesman put it, with rare wisdom, silence is “a solvent which destroys personality and gives us leave to be great and universal.” It permits us, in short, to be who we are and could be if only we had the openness and trust. A chapel is where we hear something and nothing, ourselves and everyone else, a silence that is not the absence of noise, but the presence of something much deeper: the depth beneath our thoughts.

A chapel is where you can hear something beating below your heart.

Pico Iyer, Where Silence Is Sacred