Tag: Awareness

Setting out on journeys and getting lost

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Today is Bloomsday, the day that James Joyce set for his novel Ulysses, a story of a journey across the city of Dublin, based on the wanderings of Ulysses sailing home after the Battle of Troy. It  reflects the ancient theme of life as a journey, of wisdom gained as we go along, of being blown off course and reaching a destination through paths not expected. It is the same for us: every day of our lives, winds blow and shift our direction. Some take us along with joy. Others throw us off-balance for a while, and there are winds that can blow hard and long, forcing us to keep our heads low under the gale. We all prefer to travel in sunny weather. However, what these ancient (and modern) stories tell us is that wisdom is an unexpected gift, and it frequently comes when we leave behind what we think we know or when we go through what  seems like detours or thorough getting lost. The realities of life challenge us with much that is not on our simplistic maps, and we have to let go and sometimes wander in the dark, trusting that the outcome will be revealed in time.

Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery. Love, and don’t be caught in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be. When you love, everything will come right. Love has its own action. Love, and you will know the blessings of it. Keep away from the authority who tells you what love is and what it is not. No authority knows and he who knows cannot tell. Love, and there is understanding.

Krisnamurti

Always switched on

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them…To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — continuously. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.

We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking.

Linda Stone, Continual Partial Attention

A way of being with the joyful and the painful

Karl Duffy3 Comments

If we practice mindfulness, we get in touch with the refreshing and joyful aspects of life in us and around us, the things we are not able to touch when we live in forgetfulness.  Mindfulness makes things like our eyes, our heart, our non-toothache, the beautiful moon and the trees deeper and more beautiful.  If we touch these wonderful things with mindfulness, they will reveal their full splendor. 

[But also]..when we touch our pain with mindfulness, we will begin to transform it.  When a baby is crying in the living room, his mother goes in right away to hold him tenderly in her arms. Because mother is made of love and tenderness, when she does that, love and tenderness penetrate the baby and, in only a few minutes, the baby will probably stop crying.  Mindfulness is the mother who cares for your pain every time it begins to cry.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Touching Peace

Lives as a to-do list

Karl Duffy2 Comments
Better is one handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and grasping after the wind. Ecclesiastes 4:6

Often our lives become so driven that we are moving through our moments to get to better ones at some later point. We live to check things off our to-do list, then fall into bed exhausted at the end of the day, only to jump up the next morning to get on the treadmill once again. This way of living, if we can call it living, is compounded by all the ways in which our lives are now driven by the ever-quickening expectations we place on ourselves and that others place on us and we on them, generated in large measure by our increasing dependence on ubiquitous digital technology and its ever-accelerating effects on our pace of life. If we are not careful, it is all too easy to fall into becoming more of a human doing than a human being, and forget who is doing all the doing, and why. 

Jon Kabat Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners

Appreciation, today

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Have you ever noticed how much emphasis some people place on even the smallest amount of difficulty in their lives, and how little time they spend reflecting on moments of happiness? Part of the reason for this is the idea that happiness is somehow rightfully ours, and that everything else is therefore wrong or out of place.

The idea of taking time out to be grateful may sound a little trite to some, but it’s essential if we want to get some more headspace. It’s very difficult to be caught up in lots of distracting thoughts when there is a strong sense of appreciation in your life. And by developing a more heartfelt appreciation of what we have, we also begin to see more clearly what’s missing in the lives of others.

Andy Puddicombe, Ten Tips for Living more Mindfully

Becoming grounded in the wind

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I spent the last ten days on retreat in England, where the weather was far from what could be likened to Summer. They are calling it a European Monsoon, and certainly,  one day,  the wind blew strongly, breaking branches from the trees and even making standing still quite difficult. A bit like our ongoing,  daily,  experience of the mind:

Our minds are like flags in the wind, fluttering this way and that, depending on which way the wind blows. Even if we don’t want to feel angry, jealous, lonely, or depressed, we’re carried away by such feelings and by the thoughts and physical sensations that accompany them. We’re not free; we can’t see other options, other possibilities. The goal of attention, or shamatha, practice is to become aware of awareness. Awareness is the basis, or what you might call the “support,” of the mind. It is steady and unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached. When we recognize and become grounded in awareness of awareness, the “wind” of emotion may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward, watching the shifts and changes with the intention of becoming familiar with that aspect of consciousness that recognizes “Oh, this is what I’m feeling, this is what I’m thinking.” As we do so, a bit of space opens up within us. With practice, that space—which is the mind’s natural clarity—begins to expand and settle.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoché

Image from http://www.freeimages.co.uk