Tag: Awareness

Moments when we see

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Sometimes, admittedly,  the world can still of a sudden assume a resonance beyond

the one-dimensional, as the sun sometimes breaks through the Irish summer’s ample blanket of cloud cover.

And sometimes even in the rain there comes a moment when

the bird on the neighbouring roof  is an ancient symbol or a hieroglyph

in the book of the riddle’s meaning.

And this is poetry, when the bird preaches to you, and you respond

By preaching strictly for the birds.

Ciaran O’Donnell, A Former Franciscan visits Assisi

Noticing, right now, this morning

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Normally,  fantasies are spinning out , one after another, usually about being someplace else or being different from what we are right now. What about a moment of stopping  and checking whether this is going on right now?  Simply waking up this moment to what is taking place right now, opening up to……nothing special. Just wind blowing, windows rattling, birds calling, breath flowing in and out, bright sunlight flowing through the shades making patterns on the floor. When that happens it is clear that no wishing has brought it about! Being here and now in unadorned simplicity is our true state – whole and inseparable from anything else.

Toni Parker, The Silent Question

New to Mindfulness Practice 9: See things when they arise

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Understanding how our emotions have the power to run us around in circles helps us discover how we increase our pain, how we cause harm to ourselves. Because of mindfulness we see things when they arise…we can stop harming ourselves and harming others. We don’t buy into the chain reaction that makes things grow from minute to expansive – we leave things minute.

Pema Chodron

Trusting our natural wisdom

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Allie shared this lovely poem from Rumi at our MBSR Course last evening.  It harmonizes well with the intention of the Course – using our body’s natural wisdom to help us deal with the challenges of life. Mindfulness is a practice of simple presence, before we attach any labels, stories or descriptions to what is happening in our life. Each day we practice shifting our attention, making ourselves available to the moment as it presents itself. In this way, our natural wisdom can reveal itself.

There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox.  A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid, and it doesn’t move from outside to inside through conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead,  from within you, moving out.

Rumi, Two Kinds of Intelligence.

New to Mindfulness Practice 7: Drop the commentary

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When we practice meditation, we express confidence in the simple yet powerful gesture of opening to whatever arises during our meditation session.  We discover that the practice requires that we sit still on the cushion, letting go of our internal dialogue, opening to our world — very simply, very directly.

When we examine this experience of opening, we find that we are expressing a part of ourselves that we may tend to overlook: we are expressing our ability to trust ourselves completely. In order to open — in meditation and in life in general — we must let go of our familiar thoughts and emotions, we must step out from behind the safe curtain of our inner rehearsals and onto the stage of reality, even if it’s for just a brief moment. When we open on the cushion, we renounce our attachment to our emotional security blanket, over and over again. We drop our pretense and our story lines and stand naked in the midst of uncertainty — the very essence of confidence itself.

Michael Carroll,  Bringing Spiritual Confidence to the Workplace

New to Mindfulness Practice 6: Notice the breath

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As you start the practice, you have a sense of your body and a sense of where you are, and then you begin to notice the breathing. The whole feeling of the breath is very important. The breath should not be forced, obviously; you are breathing naturally. The breath is going in and out, in and out. With each breath you become relaxed.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche