Tag: Awareness

Non-productive patterns of thought

Karl Duffy3 Comments

When we sit and try to quieten the mind, the first thing we usually notice is how many thoughts we have. For those who are beginning meditation this is what strikes first. However, even those who have practiced meditation for some time can still have times when the thinking mind is very busy One way of working with that busyness is to broadly label the  thoughts, thus allowing them pass through and reducing the amount of weight which we give to them. This has the effect of turning down the amount of energy associated with them and creating more space and calm in the mind. In other words, rather than getting caught up, we step out of the stream:

If you label your disruptive thoughts, you will get an idea of your habitual thought patterns. We use one descriptive word such as ‘future,’ ‘past,’ ‘planning’, ‘remembering’, ‘wanting’, ‘rejecting’, ‘resisting’, ‘bored’, ‘disinterest’, ‘nonsense’, ‘fantasy’, ‘dream’. It doesn’t matter which word comes to mind first. Eventually you can see a pattern, for example that you are constantly planning. When you notice your thought patterns in this way, you can see they are non-productive and drop them.

Ayya Khema

Contentment with oneself…

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When  you  sit, let things settle and allow all  your  discordant self  with  its ungenuineness and unnaturalness to  dissolve,  out of  that  rises  your real being. You  experience  an  aspect  of yourself which is more genuine and more authentic-the “real” you.  As  you  go deeper, you begin to discover and connect  with  your fundamental goodness. The  whole point of meditation is to get used to the that  aspect which you have forgotten. In Tibetan “meditation” means  “getting used to”. Getting used to what? To your true nature.  This  is  why,  you are told to “rest in the nature of mind”. You  just quietly  sit  and let all thoughts and concepts dissolve.  It  is like  when the clouds dissolve or the mist evaporates, to  reveal the clear sky and the sun shining down. When everything dissolves like  this, you begin to experience your true nature, to  “live”. Then you know it, and at that moment, you feel really good. It is unlike  any  other  feeling of well being  that  you  might  have experienced.  This is a real and genuine goodness, in  which  you feel  a  deep sense of peace, contentment  and  confidence  about yourself.

Sogyal Rinpoche,  Essential Teachings on Meditation

Not defined by past experiences

Karl Duffy4 Comments

You may struggle to understand your authentic self. For instance, you may unconsciously assume that you are the collection of old habits of mind that you have accrued over your lifetime in reaction to difficulty, disappointment and uncertainty. You may believe you are someone who is anxious because as a child you had to endure a constant stream of criticism from your parents. Or you may see yourself as a failure because you haven’t achieved your career goals. But these conditioned  mind states are not you – they are merely thoughts and feelings. These thoughts and feelings, as you can observe for yourself, are temporary and ever-changing, and arise episodically. So while they may characterise your experience sometimes, they don’t define you. Your authentic self is defined by the values from which you respond to these mind states.

Phillip Moffitt, Emotional Chaos to Clarity

Noticing the extraordinary in the ordinary

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Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and

seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves.

Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte, Everything is waiting for you

When busy, just take time to stop and notice

Karl Duffy1 Comment

car_breakdown.jpgIn your life just take time to stop, just this sense of stopping and opening when you find yourself in that moment – “Oh I’m caught up, this thing, the next thing and the next thing” …… Just say to yourself  “STOP” and relax and open – try to listen to the sound of silence.

And even if you can’t notice it,  just that stopping just being caught in that momentum of busyness of compulsion…one thing to the next and one thought to the other –  it’s a dualistic world, a conditioned world that we bind ourselves in – going from one thing to the other, until we get tired and go to bed – we get up and again we do this and we do that, running around one thing after the other…. Now,  that is going from one condition to another…we get caught up in our own particular conditioning and programming – worry worry worry – meeting the deadline. It is always like this – this sense of feeling that there’s always something else, something I have to do, something that needs to be done!

So then the stopping and reflecting,  just stopping and being the KNOWER of this feeling – not trying to suppress it but just recognise that  compulsive momentum….. “its like THIS” …this feeling of rushing…of going onto the next thing – meeting the deadline, so much to do, so much pressure, its like THIS.  Now staying with that, even for a moment is better than not doing it at all – not just being a helpless victim of compulsive habits, until you burn out and break down. It’s like running a motor car until it just breaks down, not reading the signs. This is your life – don’t be intimidated by it or just become a victim of habits.

Ajahn Sumedho

We are not our moods…

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Mindfulness practice, as it deepens, is a practical way of relating to thoughts, of working with difficult emotions – especially as they present in body sensations – and finally, and maybe most crucially,  a way of relating to our sense of self.  One way this may be helpful, in a pragmatic way of dealing with the up’s and down’s of each day,  is to continually  define ourselves in a fluid, on-going,  non-fixed sense, understanding life, as it were, as always being born in each moment. We try to bring attention to these continual little births, seeing how an event or moment gives birth to a new emotion and is followed by a new thought (or more likely, a re-hashing of familiar, old patterns of thought).  Rather than allowing that  thought take hold, identifying with it and making it part of our story, we can let it pass through. Rather than attaching some of our  identity to these moments, and the narrative that accompanies them , we can hold ourselves lightly, not limiting ourselves to the moods we experience or the judgmental thoughts they generate. In this way we can develop a sense of ease as we no longer feel the need to defend the “self” created by them.

Once we are able to perceive that there is change only, and that we ourselves are part of the change, there is no longer anything to possess, no me to possess, no such things as possession. Moreover, I can understand that the impulses that torment me have no more solidity and fixity than any other event. If anger, for instance, were to possess any independent, real existence, then I would be faced with a great problem, for it would existing me apart from other internal or external causes, a  constant personality defect with which I would have to cope. However, since anger is a momentary state arising from conditions and then subsiding because of other conditions, when it is gone, it is really gone, extinct. I am thus not intrinsically an angry person, nor a good person, or any other kind of person.

Francis Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism