Tag: Awareness

Cultivating mental skills

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Inner conflicts are often linked with excessive rumination on the past and anticipation of the future. You are not truly paying attention to the present moment, but are engrossed in your thoughts, going on and on in a vicious circle, feeding your ego and self-centeredness. This is the opposite of bare attention. To turn your attention inside means to look at pure awareness itself and dwell without distraction, yet effortlessly, in the present moment.

If you cultivate these mental skills, after a while you won’t need to apply contrived efforts anymore. You can deal with mental perturbations like the eagles I see from the window of my hermitage in the Himalayas deal with crows. The crows often attack them, diving at the eagles from above. But, instead of doing all kinds of acrobatics, the eagle simply retracts one wing at the last moment, lets the diving crow pass, and then extends its wing again. The whole thing requires minimal effort and causes little disturbance. Being experienced in dealing with the sudden arising of emotions in the mind works in a similar way.

Matthieu Ricard, This is your Brain on Bliss

Photo: Janis Ringuette

Staying within the moment

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A key skill for sustaining mindfulness in daily life is being able to distinguish between our experience and our interpretation of our experience. Experience is simply whatever is happening in the moment — a sound, a taste, a body sensation, an emotion, an interaction, etc. Interpretation is the mind’s reaction to our experience. One way to understand this difference is that when we are directly experiencing a moment of life, we are “within” it; when we are interpreting it, we are “outside” it. 

Once you begin to recognize that interpretation is only your view of an experience, it becomes possible for you to begin to release your compulsion to interpret every moment. Ideally, your goal is to create a new habit or “default setting” for responding mindfully rather than reacting unskillfully to all types of experiences….You can begin to break your habit of automatically interpreting every experience by practicing being mindful of your experience within the experience. So when an unpleasant moment arises, be interested in the direct experience of what happens. You might say to yourself,  “I’m just going to be interested in this,” and then watch what happens. Just be in the moment and let the experience form.

Philipp Moffitt, Maintaining Mindfulness in Daily Life

Learning from the moment

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Another post by Pema Chodron on the basic practice in mindful living – staying with what is right in front of us or happening inside right now.

All religions point to the fact that being fully present is the only state in which you can wake up — not by somehow leaving.

So you have to find your own simple, grounded language to say that to yourself, and that’s a beautiful way to express it: What is this moment, this situation, or this person trying to teach me? Another one that I love is “This is a unique moment. Maybe I’m not so glad about it because it’s painful, but I don’t want to waste it, because it’s never going to happen again this way. So let’s taste it, smell it, experience it”.

Pema Chodron

Searching outside ourselves

Karl Duffy4 Comments

Because we don’t always understand what it means to be in relationship to the present moment, we search. […] What are we searching for? Depending on our particular life, our background and conditioning, what we search for may seem different from one person to another; but really we’re all looking for an ideal life.  Something seems to be missing right here, so I’m interested in searching for the missing part. What if we cease this looking, searching? What are we left with? We’re left with what’s been right there at the center all the time. Underneath all that searching there is distress. There is unease. The minute that we realize that, we see that the point isn’t the search, but rather the distress and unease which motivate the search. That’s the magic moment – when we realize that searching outside of ourselves is not the way.

We begin to see that it isn’t the searching that’s at fault, but something about where we look. And we return more and more to the disappointment, which is always at the center. We’re in pain and we use the search to alleviate that pain. We begin to see that the pain comes because we are pinching ourselves. The very peace we’ve been searching for so hard lies in recognizing this fact: I’m pinching myself. No one’s doing it to me.

Charlotte Joko Beck

The moment that is now

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Drop into the moment that is now.

No need to judge, no need to have an agenda as to what will be, no need to say, “I am meditating”.

Just be here, drink in all that this moment has to offer as if it is the only one that you have – because it truly is

Jon Kabat Zinn

The Body-mind

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Mindfulness is a form of Mind-Body medicine, a different way of knowing, a different way of being with our experience.  From an early age, and once we start school, our capacity to think and analyse is prioritized as the best way of working with what happens in each day. However, we learn in mindfulness is that through awareness there is a wider, kinder, less judgmental way of being with reality. We also come to see that there is a wisdom in our bodies which often “knows” much more than our thoughts. So tuning into our bodies is the fundamental daily skill of mindfulness. Broken down to its most basic from –  we focus on the breath in the body,  which allows us to notice our thoughts as they arise in the mind and, gently, gradually, let go of struggling with them. In this way we work with what has brought us to this day, as well as laying the foundations for greater happiness and health  in the future. Thubten Chodron quotes a Tibetan saying: ‘If you want to know about your past life, look at your present body. If you want to know about your future life, look at your present mind.’  There is a great wisdom in this.