Awareness – Page 440 – Mindfulbalance

Seeing the freshness in each moment

July 17, 2012July 16, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

How we relate to the dynamic flow of energy is important. We can learn to relax with it, recognizing it as our basic ground, as a natural part of life; Or the feeling of uncertainty, of nothing to hold on to, can cause us to panic, and instantly a chain reaction begins. Our energy and the energy of the universe are always in flux, but we have little tolerance for this unpredictability, and we have little ability to see ourselves and the world as an exciting, fluid situation that is always fresh and new. Instead we get stuck in a rut – the rut of “I want” and “I don’t want,” . . . the rut of continually getting hooked by our personal preferences.

Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap

Missing the view, now

July 15, 2012July 14, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

The chief obstacle to our happiness is our concept of happiness. Above all we tend to think that certain conditions must be present for us to be happy. We think we cannot be happy until we meet certain life goals. All of this future-orientated thinking, instead of making us happy, becomes a reason for us to be unhappy now. And if we aren’t happy now, the postponement of our happiness regresses into an infinitely receding future. We chase the horizon in endless anticipation and continual frustrations. We never get there, because we always hope to arrive there someday. It’s as if we are on a beautiful hiking trail, where there are spectacular mountains, lush meadows, cool streams, quiet lakes and beautiful trees, but we’re unhappy because we’re caught up in the concept that the view around the next corner will be better, while the one surrounding us is nothing at all.

Thomas Bien, The Buddha’s way of Happiness

You are all possibilities

July 13, 2012July 10, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

South West Coast Path above Pudcombe Cove

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Søren Kierkegaard

… Look back down the path as if seeing your past and then south over the hazy blue coast as if present to a wide future,
recall the way you are all possibilities you can see and how you live best as an appreciator of horizons
whether you reach them or not,
admit that once you have got up from your chair and opened the door,
once you have walked out into the clean air
toward that edge and taken the path up high beyond the ordinary you have become
the privileged and the pilgrim
the one who will tell the story
and the one, coming back
from the mountain,
who helped to make it.

David Whyte, Mameen

Allowing and letting go

July 12, 2012July 10, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

We’ve never really accepted boredom as a conscious state. As soon as it comes into the mind we start looking for something interesting, something pleasant. But in meditation we’re allowing boredom to be. We’re allowing ourselves to be fully consciously bored, fully depressed, fed up, jealous, angry, disgusted. All the nasty unpleasant experiences of life that we have repressed out of consciousness and never really looked at, never really accepted, we begin to accept into conscious-ness not as personality problems any more, but just out of compassion. Out of kindness and wisdom we allow things to take their natural course to cessation, rather that just keep them going round in the same old cycles of habit. When we get used to looking through a dirty window everything seems grey, grimy and ugly. Meditation is a way of cleaning the window, purifying the mind, allowing things to come up into consciousness and letting them go.

Ajahn Sumedho,

More on being a witness today

July 11, 2012July 14, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Gurdjieff, the Russian philosopher-mystic, noted that if you set an alarm clock at night in order to get up early to get some work done, who you are in the morning when the alarm goes off is quite different from who you were the night before. In the morning you might even say, “Who the **** set that alarm clock?” A moment’s reflection will show you that you play many roles in the course of a day … and that WHO YOU ARE from moment to moment changes. There is the angry you, and the kind you, the lazy you, the lustful you – hundreds of different you’s. Each of these “you’s” reflects an identification with a desire, or a feeling, or a thought. If, as we have seen, the work is to break these identifications, we can WORK effectively throughout each day by making each of these “you’s” objects, i.e., by breaking the identification with each of them. This is not so easy.

…[But] there is one technique which is known as adopting the role of the witness – and holding onto that role – ultimately, to the exclusion of all roles. The witness is not evaluative. It does not judge your actions. It merely notes them. This point is important. Most of the time the inner voices of most people are continually evaluative. “I’m good for doing this” or “I’m bad for doing that.” You must make that evaluative role an object of contemplation as well. Keep in mind that the witness does not care whether you become enlightened or not. It merely notes how it all is.

Ram Daas, Be Here Now

Just witness, not judging yourself

July 10, 2012July 5, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

Maybe you have a hard time getting up in the morning. Just make that conscious. Maybe you are a night owl and you prefer waking up late, you find early morning’s difficult. You do not need to fit your mind’s image of the perfect meditator – just witness the struggle of your mind, or your discomfort. If your mind is bright or comfortable in the morning then notice that too. The more you witness and take refuge in the knowing mind, the more you will find that whatever needs to be discarded will be discarded. Whatever is not useful will just naturally fall away, but not through rejection or aversion, simply through the knowing of the experience in each moment.