Tag: balance

Keep your practice simple

Karl Duffy2 Comments

In meditation, the practice of calming, resting, and dwelling  happily in the present moment can be difficult at first, because our minds are always racing. The more you try to stop your racing mind, the more it resists. Mindfulness is not meant to suppress or get rid of the racing mind, but simply recognize its presence. First you need to recognize that thinking nonstop has become a strong habit for you. The easiest way to stop that habit from taking you over is to learn how to breathe in a sitting position for a short time, for just five or ten breaths. If you think you have to practice meditation for too long a period of time, there is no way you will maintain a daily practice. Instead throughout the day, use the ringing of the telephone, or the sound of your watch, or any other cue,  to stop all doing and thinking  for a moment. Just enjoy your breathing. Our son started sitting when he was three or four years old. He sat for ten breaths every morning. And if a little child can do that, I am sure we grown-ups can do it as well.

Nguyen Ann-Huong, Walking Meditation

Becoming a friendly audience to your experience

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Here’s a definition of mindfulness: it’s a strengthening of your concentration so that you can be more precise and clear in recognizing your experience. It’s also a strengthening of your equanimity—your ability to be relaxed and open in the face of your experience. The concentration part of mindfulness is a little like drinking a cup of coffee; it kind of wakes you up. It’s like the straight spine of arousal or awareness. The equanimity part is like the relaxed limbs of the body. The spine is straight, and the limbs are relaxed. This relaxation part is a receptivity and acceptance to things as they are. It’s a kind of “friendly audience” to your own experience; a sort of “Hello. Wow! OK.” attitude—a gentle, matter-of-fact awareness of your experience, rather than a reactive pulling back. All mindfulness practices cultivate both of those, the concentration and the equanimity, so that you can be clearer, more precise and more relaxed in the face of whatever is happening to you—whether it’s loud noises coming in from a jackhammer running in the next building, or a pain in your knee, or your emotions about your spouse.

Polly Young-Eisendrath, Jungian Analyst, Personality Type in Depth

Being true to what is real

Karl Duffy1 Comment

There is only one life  you can call your own and a thousand others you can call by any name you want.

Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don’t turn your face away.

Hold to your own truth
at the center of the image
you were born with.

By the lake in the wood in the shadows
you can whisper that truth
to the quiet reflection
you see in the water.

Whatever you hear from the water, remember,
it wants to carry
the sound of its truth on your lips.

Remember, in this place
no one can hear you

and out of the silence you can make a promise
it will kill you to break,

that way you’ll find
what is real and what is not.

David Whyte, All the true Vows

Our true nature

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence.

When the mind has settled, we are
established in our essential nature, which is unbounded consciousness.

Our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind.

Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

……and developing spaciousness.

Karl Duffy2 Comments

So let’s go back to our experience-body,  focus on it, and let things happen within that focus,  without pushing or trying to find anything, or come to a conclusion. In that context, when we come out of wanting something to happen, there’s some spaciousness – and when a feeling comes up, try to attune to that spaciousness. Develop an attitude and energy of not-feeding, demanding, pushing away, skipping off or proliferating around the feeling. This is non-attachment. By practicing in this way, we realize that for these few moments we don’t have to solve the problem of existence, or know who we are, or what we’re going to do. By being with something that we can directly attend to, not through inference or report, we can find an interesting point of nondependence.

Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

Stop fixing and choosing and doing and making….

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