Tag: balance

….and the consequent defensive nature of consuming

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Consumers are often not conscious of being motivated by social status and are far more likely to attribute such motives to others than to themselves. We live with high levels of psychological denial about the connection between our buying habits and the social statements they make. Most Americans would deny that, by their spending, they are seeking status, in the usual meaning of the word — looking to position themselves in a higher economic stratum. They might point out that they don’t want everything in sight, that purchases are often highly selective. Indeed, what stands out most about much of the spate of spending is its defensive character. Parents worry that their children need computers and degrees from good colleges to avoid being left behind in the global economy. Children, concerned about being left out in the here and now, demand shoes, clothes, and video games. … Increasingly overworked, adults need stress-busting weekends, microwaves, restaurants meals, and takeout to keep up with their daily lives. But the cost of each of these conveniences add up.

Juliet Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need

Noticing our sense of entitlement

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Learning to live from genuine happiness requires first seeing what blocks it. One of the major blocks is our deeply rooted sense of entitlement. In fact, this is a big part of the “problem” of happiness: we firmly believe that we should be happy. We think it’s our right, and consequently, we feel entitled to it, even if we’re not clear what happiness is, except to feel good. This expectation can have many faces. For example, we often feel entitled to good health, expecting that we can and should be able to stay youthful and physically fit. When life comes along to greet us with illness or injury we can easily sink into a stupor of frustration and even despair. Sometimes just get­ting a cold will trigger our anxieties over losing control and feeling powerless. This sense of entitlement — which basically says that life should go the way we want and expect it to go — even tells us we shouldn’t have to experience discomfort. Then, when we do experience discomfort, we feel that some­thing is wrong; we might get angry and feel it’s unfair, or we may feel sorry for ourselves.

Ezra Bayda, Beyond Happiness

Letting go of urgency

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Sometimes I grow weary of the days with all their fits and starts.
I want to climb some old grey mountain, slowly, taking
the rest of my life to do it, resting often, sleeping
under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.
I want to see how many stars are still in the sky
that we have smothered for years now, forgiving it all,
and peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.
All that urgency!  Not what the earth is about!
How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.
I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.
In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.

  Mary Oliver, The Poet Dreams of the Mountain

 

Why weekend rest should include the mind

Karl Duffy2 Comments

In our consciousness there are wounds, lots of pains. Our consciousness also needs to rest in order to restore itself. Our consciousness is just like our body. Our body knows how to heal itself if we allow it the chance to do so. When we get a cut on our finger we don’t have to do anything except to clean it and to allow it the time to heal, because our body knows how to heal itself. The same thing is true with our consciousness; our consciousness knows how to heal itself if we know how to allow it to do so. But we don’t allow it. We always try to do something. We worry so much about healing, which is why we do not get the healing we need. Only if we know how to allow them to rest can our body and our soul heal themselves.

But there is in us what we call the energy of restlessness. We cannot be at peace with ourselves. We cannot be peaceful. We cannot sit; we cannot lie down. There is some energy in us to do this, to do that, to think of this, to think of that, and that kind of restlessness makes us unhappy. That is why it is so important for us to learn first of all to allow our body to rest. We have to learn how to deal with all our energy of restlessness. That is why we have to learn the techniques of allowing our body and our consciousness to rest.

Thich Nhat Hahn.

Models of success

Karl Duffy5 Comments

A “successful” life has become a violent enterprise.  We make war on our own bodies, pushing them beyond their limits; war on our children, because we cannot find enough time to be with them when they are hurt and afraid, and need our company; war on our spirit, because we are too preoccupied to listen to the quiet voices that seek to nourish and refresh us; war on our communities, because we are fearfully protecting what we have, and do not feel safe enough to be kind and generous; war on the earth, because we cannot take the time to place our feet on the ground and allow it to feed us, to taste its blessings and give thanks.

The more our life speeds up, the more we feel weary, overwhelmed and lost. Despite our good hearts and equally good intentions, our life and work rarely feel light, pleasant or healing. Instead, as it all piles endlessly upon itself, the whole experience of being alive begins to melt into one enormous obligation. It becomes the standard greeting everywhere: “I am so busy.” We say this to one another with no small degree of pride, as if our exhaustion were a trophy, our ability to withstand stress a mark of real character. The busier we are, the more important we seem to ourselves and, we imagine, to others. To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know that the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single mindful breath — this has become the model of a successful life.

Wayne Miller,  Sabbath

We are not our moods…

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Mindfulness practice, as it deepens, is a practical way of relating to thoughts, of working with difficult emotions – especially as they present in body sensations – and finally, and maybe most crucially,  a way of relating to our sense of self.  One way this may be helpful, in a pragmatic way of dealing with the up’s and down’s of each day,  is to continually  define ourselves in a fluid, on-going,  non-fixed sense, understanding life, as it were, as always being born in each moment. We try to bring attention to these continual little births, seeing how an event or moment gives birth to a new emotion and is followed by a new thought (or more likely, a re-hashing of familiar, old patterns of thought).  Rather than allowing that  thought take hold, identifying with it and making it part of our story, we can let it pass through. Rather than attaching some of our  identity to these moments, and the narrative that accompanies them , we can hold ourselves lightly, not limiting ourselves to the moods we experience or the judgmental thoughts they generate. In this way we can develop a sense of ease as we no longer feel the need to defend the “self” created by them.

Once we are able to perceive that there is change only, and that we ourselves are part of the change, there is no longer anything to possess, no me to possess, no such things as possession. Moreover, I can understand that the impulses that torment me have no more solidity and fixity than any other event. If anger, for instance, were to possess any independent, real existence, then I would be faced with a great problem, for it would existing me apart from other internal or external causes, a  constant personality defect with which I would have to cope. However, since anger is a momentary state arising from conditions and then subsiding because of other conditions, when it is gone, it is really gone, extinct. I am thus not intrinsically an angry person, nor a good person, or any other kind of person.

Francis Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism