Tag: Awareness

Being Dragged Around

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We’re not certain about our own goodness. We begin to stray from it as soon as we wake up in the morning, because our mind is unstable and bewildered. Our thoughts drag us around by a ring in our nose, as if we were cows in the Indian market. This is how we lose control of our lives. We don’t understand that the origin of happiness is right here in our mind. We might experience happiness at times, but we’re not sure how we got it, how to get it again, or how long it’s going to last when it comes. We live life in an anxious, haphazard state, always looking for happiness to arrive.  When we are confused about the source of happiness, we start to blame the world for our dissatisfaction, expecting it to make us happy. Then we act in ways that bring more confusion and chaos into our life. When our mind is busy and discursive, thinking uncontrollably, we are engaging in a bad habit. We are stirring up the mud of jealousy, anger, and pride. Then the mind has no choice but to become familiar with the language of negativity and develop it further.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Another simple explanation

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

This practice is just about the mind and its feelings. It is not something that you have to run after or struggle for. Breathing continues while working. Nature takes care of the natural processes – all we have to do is try to be aware. Just to keep trying, going inwards to see clearly. Meditation is like this.

Ajahn Chah, Collected Teaching, The Peace Beyond

Seeing things as they really are

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Through mindfulness we begin to realise that the pure nature of the mind is always with us, even now. Even though we might be agitated or irritated, if we are mindful we’ll experience a natural bliss beyond that. And once we realise that for ourselves, then we know how not to suffer. The end of suffering is in seeing things as they really are, so that our refuge isn’t in this reactive excited condition of the eyes and the ears and the nose, the tongue, the body, the brain, the emotions. In these are the conditions that are irritating, agitated. Through mindfulness we realise that which transcends these conditions. That is our real refuge. This we can realise as human beings through wise contemplation of our own personal predicament.

Ajahn Sumedho

A very simple explanation

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Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling.

This is what Christians call the face of God: simply taking in this world as it manifests.
We feel our body; we hear the cars and birds.
That’s all there is.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Do we really go anywhere?

Karl Duffy1 Comment

(Practice) ……. is not to be found in moving forwards, nor in moving backwards, nor in standing still. This, Sumedho, is your place of nonabiding.

Ajahn Chah,  Letter to Ajahn Sumedho

As long as we conceive reality in terms of self and time, as a “me” who is someplace and can go some other place, then we are not realizing that going forwards, going backwards, and standing still are all entirely dependent upon the relative truths of self, locality, and time. In terms of physical reality, there is a coming and going. But think about it. Where can we truly go? Do we ever really go anywhere? Wherever we go we are always “here.”

Ajahn Amaro

Where we learn

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Whatever is arising in this moment becomes the curriculum for liberating ourselves from the shackles of greed, hatred and delusion. We do not need some ideal or romantic fairy tale of what would be best for us. What we need most is what is already given to us: the actuality of things as they are in the only moment we will ever have –  this one.

Jon Kabat Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners.