Tag: Awareness

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.

What we use, we strengthen

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Inherent in any media technology – from the telephone to TV to Twitter – is an emphasis of some ways of thinking and a de-emphasis on other ways of thinking. If you look at the Internet, what it emphasizes is the ability to supply lots of information, in many forms, very quickly. As a result, it encourages us to browse through information in a similar way – by grabbing lots of bits of data simultaneously. What it doesn’t encourage us to engage in is more attentive ways of thinking – the mode of thinking that underpins deep reading, contemplation, reflection and introspection. All of these ways of using our minds – which to me, are very important are de-emphasized by the Internet, and as a result, we’re not practicing them as much anymore. I worry that as a society, we are in danger of losing them.

Nicholas Carr, from an interview with Karen Christensen

Becoming a silent watcher.

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Be present as the watcher of your mind  –  of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations.  Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react.  Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future.  Don’t judge or analyze what you observe.  Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction.  Don’t make a personal problem out of them.  You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.

Eckhart Tolle

Finding serenity within

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The nature of the mind is comparable to the ocean.

The incessant movement of waves  on the surface of the ocean prevents us from seeing its depths.

If we dive down there are no more waves;

there is just the immense serenity of the depths….

Pema Wangyal Rinpoche

How It Is

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More unseasonal weather today. With visitors arriving one would prefer things to be different. But then again, one nearly always prefers things to be other than they are, and this attitude can mean that we miss the opportunities in what is actually here:

When we explore this mind-state of dukkha, we find that it is created by a deep aversion to being with How It Is right now. This silent, unconscious war with How It Is unwittingly drives much of our behaviour: We reach for the pleasant. We hate the unpleasant. We try to arrange the world so that we have only pleasant mind-states, and not unpleasant ones. We try to get rid of this pervasive state of unsatisfactoriness in whatever way we can – by changing things “out there”.  By changing the world.

Thoreau, through his quiet investigation of his own mental states in the quiet at Walden Pond discovered this very same phenomenon of underlying unsatisfactoriness. He called it “desperation” –  “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation….” Thoreau’s quiet desperation is precisely dukkha. He saw that ordinary mind seems chronically ill at ease with How It Is.

Stephen Cope, The Wisdom of Yoga

Let go of the small sense of self.

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Meditation comes  alive through a growing capacity to release our habitual entanglement in the stories and plans, conflicts and worries that make up the small sense of self, and to rest in awareness. In meditation we do this simply by acknowledging the moment-to-moment changing conditions — the pleasure and pain, the praise and blame, the litany of ideas and expectations that arise. Without identifying with them, we can rest in the awareness itself, beyond conditions, and experience what my teacher Ajahn Chah called jai pongsai, our natural lightness of heart. Developing this capacity to rest in awareness nourishes samadhi (concentration), which stabilizes and clarifies the mind, and prajna (wisdom), that sees things as they are.

Jack Kornfield, A Mind like Sky: Wise Attention, Open Awareness.