Tag: Awareness

The monastery of your daily life

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Many people fail to distinguish between their true nature and their personality traits, particularly their less desirable traits. The fact is you are not the worst characteristics of your personality. It is the nature of the untrained mind to want what it perceives as advantageous and to fear or hate what seems painful. Discovering how your heart and mind can work together to use these feelings allows you to move beyond them. [But..]It is not an easy task. You may feel overwhelmed by the circumstances of your present life or bound by past traumatic events. Again, this is a failure in perception. They are just mind-states which can be known. They can be seen as impermanent and not belonging to you and, therefore, they do not ultimately define your true nature. A spiritual practice can provide you with the knowledge and discipline to investigate and work with these conditions.

You can do this investigation within the parameters of your present life. There is no need to wait until you can go to a monastery or get your life more together. The intensity of your desires and fears can be a source of energy that propels you to look more deeply for that which really matters. Life delivers you a series of challenges in the form of small and large good fortune, as well as petty and great misfortune. In the struggle to learn how to respond to the resulting joy, pain, and confusion, you are repeatedly challenged to seek and to act from your essence.

Phillip Moffit, Realizing Your True Nature

Visualizing our day

Karl Duffy1 Comment

What do you visualize before you start work? Do you imagine yourself managing the day successfully and calmly? Or do you anticipate all the stressful things that might come up an d how overwhelmed you’ll feel? Many of us tend to ruminate or catastrophize about the negative events we expect to happen at work. Maybe you worry about dealing with irate customers, dread making a phone call, or cringe at the prospect of hurting your back again. Regardless of whether or not these scenarios may happen or not, we often don’t imagine ourselves handling them very well. When we worry, we are prone to focus on how bad something will be, without doing any concrete problem solving or realizing that life will continue, even if this anticipated disaster occurs. Before work, rather than worry about the coming day…visualize in a positive way what will happen today. Imagine yourself having a nice day. If you’re likely to encounter obstacles or setbacks, visualize managing them well. Research shows that this kind of mental rehearsal improves later performance.

Jonathan S. Kaplan, Urban Mindfulness

Sunday quote: Silence

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Don’t look for meaning in the words.

Listen to the silences.

Samuel Beckett

Learning from the less pleasant moments

Karl Duffy1 Comment

It is essential to learn to confront the less pleasant aspects of existence. Our job as meditators is to learn to be patient with ourselves, to see ourselves in an unbiased way, complete with all our sorrows and inadequacies. We have to learn to be kind to ourselves. In the long run avoiding unpleasantness is a very unkind thing to do to yourself. Paradoxically, kindness entails confronting unpleasantness when it arises. When you are having a bad time, examine that experience, observe it mindfully, study the phenomenon and learn its mechanics. The way out of a trap is to study the trap itself, and learn how it is built. You do this by taking the thing apart, piece by piece. The trap can’t trap you if it has been taken to pieces. The result is freedom.

Bhante Gunaratna, Mindfulness in Plain English

Letting the day pass through the mind

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We can …. look upon life as something that flows through the mind. Rather than thinking of oneself as a person who is going places, consider these as images going through the mind. Right now we have the image of the meditation hall; this is what we can perceive. The sound of this voice; the feeling of sitting on a cushion; the sense of sight; see that all these things flow through the mind like a current. When Ajahn Sumedho went traveling recently he said he made the determination before he left that he wasn’t going to go around the world, he was just going to let the world go through his mind. Afterwards he said the result was very peaceful: he went everywhere, saw everyone, did everything, but the sense of movement, of a person heading towards somewhere, was absent; there was stillness in its place.

Ajahn Amaro

Lessons in every season

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Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

Mary Oliver, Starlings in Winter