Tag: balance

Opportunites to do things differently

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The best way out is always through. Robert Frost

When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. You’re able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression. You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering negative seeds from now until the day you die. And, you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.

Pema Chodron, Practicing peace in Time of War

Small pockets of air

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It’s a cultural requirement that everyone should at least put on a show of maximum stress. But the average day is not a solid wall of activity — it’s more like Swiss cheese. The key to finding a little bit of personal time is to look for the small pockets of air. Remember, we’re talking about only a few minutes at a time. Most people don’t have the luxury of big two-to-four hour blocks of time, but nearly everyone can find one-to-twenty minute blocks. When you identify them in your own life, schedule them. When you come to the appointed hour, drop everything and get settled for meditation. If you’re still having trouble letting go, meditate anyway. It is better to meditate while distracted than not to meditate at all. If you miss a session because you can’t drop what you are doing, no worries: just get yourself back on track at the next appointed time.

David Dillard-Wright, Meditation for Multitaskers

How some of the world’s biggest companies are embracing mindfulness

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The Financial Times is probably not the first paper that comes to mind if you were considering reading  about mindfulness. However, recently they ran a very good report on how meditation and mindfulness are  part of a huge change in some parts of corporate culture. Some of it is in response to the challenging economic climate we work in, as 25% of all large U.S. companies have launched stress reduction initiatives in recent years. However, some is due to a change in understanding, a recognition of the health needs of employees, and a belief that inner and outer life has to be balanced in a happy and productive employee.  What is encouraging is seeing how some companies are structuring this holistic balance into their environments. For example, General Mills, the company behind Cheerios cereal and Häagen-Dazs ice cream, have a meditation room in every building in their Campus, where employees can drop in to recharge batteries, renew focus or simply take a break from meetings or conference calls. A lot of the U.S and world’s leading companies are involved in this new dialogue, such as Google. Twitter, LinkedIn and Target, and the article goes on to show that, besides health benefits, it also seems to have an impact on cost savings, productivity and leadership quality.

It’s about training our minds to be more focused, to see with clarity, to have spaciousness for creativity and to feel connected, says Janice Marturano, General Mills’ deputy general counsel, who founded the programme there. That compassion to ourselves, to everyone around us – our colleagues, customers – that’s what the training of mindfulness is really about.

There is a lot of interesting stuff in this article and the whole of it is worth a read. You can check it out here:

The mind business – FT.com (3)

Basing ourselves on firmer ground

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In the West many of us can live in physical comfort, yet because we are continually being presented with more refined commodities or changing standards by which to measure ourselves, there’s not much contentment. And there are social and group pressures. A person might very well feel that if they’re not wearing the ‘right’ clothes their job is at risk, so they have to bear this in mind. People can become depressed, even neurotic, if their bodies don’t match up to the current standards of beauty, or if their personality is not smart enough, cynical enough, seedy enough – whatever the fashion is. We want to avoid losing out on good opportunities, and we fear the loneliness of not having any friends. So there can be a nervous feeling of inadequacy and insecurity which deprives us of a sense of trust in our innate worth as a human being.

So because of just this, it’s important that we sense and define ourselves as ‘being’ apart from those currents, if only to get onto some firmer ground. And what really helps is to be able to calm and collect the mind, and to develop oneself in what gives greater benefit. How you attend creates the dwelling place of the mind. So if we can begin to experience clarity and empathy for ourselves and others, we find ourselves living in a more appreciative and balanced way that encourages goodness to develop.

Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma

Anchoring the mind in stormy weather

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Our breathing is a stable solid ground that we can take refuge in. Regardless of our internal weather – our thoughts, emotions and perceptions- our breathing is always with us like a faithful friend. Whenever we feel carried away, or sunken in a deep emotion, or scattered in worries and projects, we return to our breathing to collect and anchor our mind. We feel the flow of air coming in and going out of our nose. We feel how light and natural, how calm and peaceful our breathing functions. At any time, we can return to this peaceful source of life.

We may like to recite: “Breathing in I know that I am breathing in.
Breathing out I know that I am breathing out.”

We do not need to control our breath. Feel the breath as it actually is. It may be long or short, deep or shallow. Conscious breathing is the key to uniting body and mind and bringing the energy of mindfulness into everyday life.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Learning from the season – let go

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Now is the end of summer, harvest time. From that point of view, [Fall ] is a chance to harvest the results of whatever has happened in our lives this year…To be a student of meditation is to take to heart that short-term fixes are usually illusions. To make real change, we need an actual path. Any genuine path takes time.  Most of the time, we simply want to practice more things than we can practice, take on more than we can take on, achieve more than is possible to achieve. This is especially true if you live in an exciting and overstimulating city. The wish to do more things than we can actually do comes from a positive place –  it’s because we love life, recognize impermanence and want to experience as much as we possibly can before it all slips on by. That’s why we end up doing WAY too many things and driving ourselves nuts with busy-ness. Sadly, when we try to do everything, we find ourselves doing much less than if we just took on a few things. 

Here’s the exercise in simplicity that I often introduce to students when I work with them closely. Let’s say that each day you can only do five things. Each of these five things must be done with the view of a practice, a process that we engage in to develop our heartminds and cultivate the qualities we want to embody in this precious and not-long-enough life of ours. You can only do five practices every day. Not six, not eight. Five.

Let’s assume for the purpose of this exercise that the basics – such as food, shelter, and medicine –  are all taken care of each day. Let’s assume that after that, you can do five things, each of which is viewed as a practice, which means each is a process where daily engagement in the process is considered more important than outcome. If you only had five practices for the fall, what would they be?

Ethan Nichtern, “A Meditation for the Fall”,  Huffington Post