Tag: Awareness

Becoming calmer and calmer

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When you are practicing….. do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything. It appears as if something comes from outside your mind, but actually it is only the waves of your mind, and if you are not bothered by the waves, gradually they will become calmer and calmer.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

Recognize the happiness you have

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Mindfulness helps you go home to the present.

And every time you go there
and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Not knowing can be good

Karl Duffy1 Comment

In our practice we keep returning to the present moment, trying to pay attention and stay there. Life continually gives occasions for practicing this skill and especially for noticing how many times we are away. The present is really the only time there is and the more we practice with it,  the more we see how each moment is special, and to a certain extent complete. However, in another important sense, our practice allows us see that the present is fluid and incomplete and that being open to this also holds a real richness. It allows us hold a space, between the past and the future, ready for all possibilities, not needing to know the whole picture but rather trusting that it will appear in its own time:

In-between is where humans always are,
thats what we have to welcome,
a story with an uncertain ending.

And this condition is interesting if you inhabit it;
it’s alive.

If I’m facing something that I don’t know what to do,
the “not knowing” is what is true,
and the resources that I have,
deeply ignorant that I am,
will have to be enough.

John Tarrant

Reducing the big picture down to what is in front of us

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It seems that the key to the practice is maintaining vision and focus. Vision keeps an overview of what one is doing and the greater context in mind. Focus is concerned with the specific task at hand. The whole thing is too big to focus on at once but I can start with one simple thing, the floors. I like sweeping the floors. I know how to do it. I don’t feel anxious about it. I find it relaxing. And most days, people haven’t taken away the dust pan and broom so it is actually possible to do. When I’m sweeping the floor, I enjoy it. I relax into the movement, feel my body and breath and focus on the bit of floor I’m sweeping. But I keep the whole floor in mind. So the vision is the whole floor and the focus is the little bit I’m working on.

Ajahn Thanasanti, Maintaining vision, while Focusing

Being content with what you have

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Reflecting on life in this human form: it is just like this, it’s being able to sit peacefully and get up peacefully and be content with what you have; it’s that which makes our life as a daily experience something that is joyful and not suffering. And this is how most of our life can be lived – you can’t live in ecstatic states of rapture and bliss and do the dishes, can you?    That’s why whenever we contemplate cessation, we’re not looking for the end of the universe but just the exhalation of the breath or the end of the day or the end of the thought or the end of the feeling. To notice that means that we have to pay attention to the flow of life – we have to really notice the way it is rather than wait for some kind of fantastic experience of marvelous light descending on us, zapping us or whatever.  Can you trust that? Can you trust in just letting everything go and cease and not being anybody and not having any mission, not having to become anything?

Ajahn Sumedho, Being Nobody

Becoming more awake

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We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators:

We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.

Pema Chodron