balance – Page 528 – Mindfulbalance

Lean towards, not away

August 13, 2012August 12, 2012 Karl Duffy4 Comments

The next time you lose heart and you can’t bear to experience what you are feeling, you might recall this instruction: change the way you see it and lean in……Instead of blaming our discomfort on outer circumstances or on our own weakness, we can choose to stay present and awake to our experience, not rejecting it, not grasping it, not buying the stories that we relentlessly tell ourselves. This is priceless advice that addresses the true cause of suffering – yours, mine, and that of all living beings.

Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap

Preoccupied with becoming, not being

August 11, 2012August 8, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

Craving can be future-oriented – trying to become successful, powerful, thin, or beautiful; dreaming about being with the perfect partner; worrying about losing your job and so on. It can be fixed on the past, replaying a painful incident over and over again, stirring up old hurts with resentment and revenge, or dwelling on nostalgic replays of the good old days. It takes many shapes and forms but its hallmark is a lack of peace. If our attention is taken up with this energy of dissatisfaction we are not available for spiritual inquiry. As long as we are preoccupied we are distracted by experiences that come and go, preoccupied with changing experiences, preoccupied with being born and dying. This precludes any possibility of noticing deeper realities.

Ajahn Viradhammo

Not having a fixed idea of progress

August 9, 2012August 7, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The individuation process, as the way of development and maturation of the psyche, does not follow a straight line, nor does it always lead onwards and upwards. The course it follows is rather “stadial”, consisting of progress and regress, flux and stagnation in alternating sequence. Only when we glance back over a long stretch of the way can we notice the development. If we wish to mark out the way somehow or other, it can equally well be considered a “spiral”, the same problems and motifs occurring again and again on different levels.

It is always a matter of something obsolete that must be left behind to die in order that the new may be born.

Jolande Jacobi, Jungian psychologist

Holding everything lightly

August 9, 2012August 7, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

We should always remember that meditation is the cultivation and practice of nonattachment….Mindfulness is nothing but the middle way. It is neither an intense practice, nor can it be done without effort. It must be done with balance. Properly done, it is neither detached pushing away nor egoistic clinging. Be very careful about sitting down with ideas like, “I am sitting, I am watching, I am breathing, I am meditating, I am this, that is mine”.

Buddhadasa Bhikku

Learning from the eagles

August 8, 2012August 7, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Afflictive mental states begin with self-centeredness, with an increase in the gap between self and others. These states are related to excessive self-importance and self-cherishing associated with fear or resentment towards others, and grasping for outer things as part of a hopeless pursuit of selfish happiness. A selfish pursuit of happiness is a lose-lose situation: you make yourself miserable and make others miserable as well. Inner conflicts are often linked with excessive rumination on the past and anticipation of the future. You are not truly paying attention to the present moment, but are engrossed in your thoughts, going on and on in a vicious circle.

This is the opposite of bare attention. To turn your attention inside means to look at pure awareness itself and dwell without distraction, yet effortlessly, in the present moment. If you cultivate this mental skill, after a while you won’t need to apply contrived efforts anymore. You can deal with mental perturbations like the eagles I see from the window of my hermitage in the Himalayas deal with crows. The crows often attack them, diving at the eagles from above. But, instead of doing all kinds of acrobatics, the eagle simply retracts one wing at the last moment, lets the diving crow pass, and then extends its wing again. The whole thing requires minimal effort and causes little disturbance. Being experienced in dealing with the sudden arising of emotions in the mind works in a similar way.

Matthieu Richard

Photo from TrekEarth.com

A way to restore balance

August 7, 2012August 6, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

To live well, we need to be able to see what’s happening, in us and around us. We also need to know how not to get impulsively drawn into unskillful, reactive patterns of behavior that don’t serve us or those around us well. Mindfulness offers us a way of paying attention to what’s actually going on, to know what’s happening at an experiential level. And that is something that we tend not to train ourselves in these days — instead our education system, our workplaces, our media, our governments, all tend to train us in creating and valuing concepts or products — we get stuck at a head level and a doing level, driven by thinking and activity. There’s nothing wrong with ideas or products, but there’s an imbalance in our culture whereby a more intuitive knowledge is ignored, or just not cultivated, and it is this kind of intuitive awareness that mindfulness practice can help us to unlock. So mindfulness could be a way for us to restore balance — to help us recalibrate in a way that enables us to connect with our deepest, most heartfelt values and to act in accordance with them more often. That in turn, could lead to us living happier, healthier lives in a happier, healthier world.