Awareness – Page 504 – Mindfulbalance

Stop fixing and choosing and doing and making….

November 5, 2011November 4, 2011 Karl Duffy1 Comment

The engine that makes this go is taking a step back and trusting the body, trusting the breath, trusting the heart. We’re living our lives madly trying to hold onto everything, and it looks like it might work for awhile but in the end it always fails, and it never was working, and the way to be happy, the way to be loving, the way to be free is to really be willing to let go of everything on every occasion or at least to make that effort. So the practice really works with sitting down, returning awareness to the body, returning awareness to the breath. It usually involves sitting up straight and opening up the body and lifting the body so that the breath can be unrestrained. And then returning the mind to the present moment of being alive, which is anchored in the breath, in the body.

Then, of course, other things happen. You have thoughts, you have feelings. You might have a pain, an ache, visions, memories, reflections. All these things arise, but instead of applying yourself to them and getting entangled in them, you just bear witness to it, let it go, come back to the breathing and the body, and what happens is you release a whole lot of stuff in yourself. A whole new process comes into being that would not have been there if you were always fixing and choosing and doing and making. This way you’re allowing something to take place within your heart.

Norman Fischer

Noticing the effects of a frantic age 4: Shutting out

November 4, 2011November 4, 2011 Karl Duffy1 Comment

In a world of dwindling resources, where each person’s share of the physical realm decreases over time, it is no wonder that physical reality fails to satisfy. But thanks to the new, intimate, glowing handheld mobile devices, the unsatisfactory real world can be blotted out, and replaced with a cleansed, bouncy, shiny version of society in which little avatars utter terse little messages. In the cyber-realm there are no sweaty bodies, no cacophony of voices to suffer through — just a smooth, polished, expertly branded user experience.

While riding the subway through the Boston rush hour, I have been able to observe just how well these personal electronic mental life support units work in shielding people from the sight of their fellow-passengers…. with more and more people in obvious distress. By focusing all of their attentions on the tiny screen, they are also spared the sight of our well-worn and crumbling urban infrastructure. It is as if the physical world doesn’t really exist for them, or at least doesn’t matter. But as Masanobu Fukuoka put it, “If we throw Mother Nature out the window, she comes back through the door with a pitchfork,” and as we ignore the physical realm, the physical economy (the one that actually keeps people fed and sheltered and moves them about the landscape) shrinks and decays.

Dmitry Orlov

When we are hurt in our life

November 3, 2011November 4, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Sitting with and through all sorts of conditions that don’t fit our picture of how we want our life to go may be a far more valuable practice than being able to settle into a calm or blissful quiet. When we sit we are doing two things. First, sitting becomes a container; whatever has happened we sit still and feel it. The other side of sitting is the stillness of non-reactivity. We feel all…without doing anything to anybody. The feeling becomes our own responsiblity. Instead of our attention being directed, as it usually is, to making somebody else treat us differently, the way we want to be treated, we come back to experiencing what is at stake in being treated this way, what the hurt is really all about, and who we think we are that we can be hurt.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness

Leaning into fear

November 2, 2011November 5, 2011 Karl Duffy2 Comments

In the Christian calendar, November 2nd is the day set aside for remembering those who have died in the past year, as well as members of our own families who have died. The origins of this are probably found in the basic awareness of the approach of winter and the shortening of the days, which speak to us of change and the impermanence of all things. It also can help us reflect on the other losses and disappointments which have occurred this last year and in our lives. Such moments can provoke fear and anxiety in us. As we are reminded here, one way of working with fear is not to turn away from it, but to turn towards and rest with the sensation it raises in the body.

Leaning into suffering does not mean losing our balance and getting lost in suffering. Because our usual stance in relating to suffering is leaning away from it, to turn and face suffering directly serves as a correction. As we lean in, we are inviting, moving toward what we habitually resist…leaning in can help us become aware and free in the midst of our experience.

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Staying with the way things are

November 1, 2011October 31, 2011 Karl Duffy1 Comment

The ancient festival of Samhain, which lies behind modern-day Halloween, marked the end of the Celtic year as well as putting an end to agricultural work and trade. It meant that people followed the rhythm of nature and wound down their activity. This festival began that period of resting and was an occasion for meeting up, for building bonfires, celebrating the harvest and for storytelling. It was also the traditional time for slaughtering animals in order to prepare stores of meat and grain to last through the coming winter. The bonfire tradition still persists in Ireland and England to this day. Despite the fanciful modern notion that it was a night when the spirit world was particularly close, it is more correct to say that the whole Celtic worldview saw very little division between the worlds, and this view was present every day of the year. This does not mean the modern Halloween emphasis on ghosts and goblins but rather a sense of an openness to the spiritual in the everyday, reflected in the Irish langauge’s belief that the other world was always there right beside you, in every field and on every hilltop, in the trees and animals and even in the stones.

We move from this worldview when we think that life is better somewhere else, other than in the tasks we face this day, and everyday. We often treat the things that we have to do, especially if they are repetitive or mundane, as moments to be gotten “out-of-the-way” so that we can get to something more “meaningful” or exciting. But, as the Irish poet Paddy Kavanagh, who is rooted in this Celtic worldview, reminds us, God is in the bits and pieces of everyday. He saw his writing as an attempt to explode the atoms of ordinary experience. And all wisdom traditions agree with this ancient way of seeing, as do modern stress reduction programmes, when they speak about paying attention to what is happening now, and not rushing past it. The way to contentment is not by waiting to have the best of everything but by being able to start with what we already have – this schedule, the personality we have, the situation we are actually in, the demands of this day. In working with these we are putting ourselves in contact with this actual moment and not doing what we frequently prefer – living in thoughts or idealistic dreams about it.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Rumi