Tag: Be fully present

Challenges and struggles

Karl Duffy1 Comment

One of the most toxic new-age ideas is that we should “keep a positive attitude.” What a crazy, crazy idea that is. It is much healthier, much more healing, to allow yourself to feel whatever is coming up in you, and allow yourself to work with that anxiety, depression, grief. Because, underneath that, if you allow those feelings to come up and express themselves, then you can find the truly positive way of living in relationship to those feelings. That’s such an important thing…..It’s not  about some “spiritual experience” of being high all the time. Not at all. It is about living with the ongoing stresses and strains and difficulties – and joys –  of life, but doing so in a way that we feel whole. Living in relationship with the struggles of life is what makes us human.

Michael Lerner, The Difference between Healing and Curing

Pause

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Taking our hands off the controls and pausing is an opportunity to clearly see the wants and fears that are driving us. During the moments of a pause, we become conscious of how the feeling that something is missing or wrong keeps us leaning into the future, on our way somewhere else. This gives us a fundamental choice in how we respond: We can continue our futile attempts at managing our experience, or we can meet our vulnerability with the wisdom of radical acceptance.

Tara Brach, The Sacred Pause

Practices that stretch us

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There is nothing I dislike

Linji, died 866, founder of the Rinzai school of Zen

In Zen,  koans or phrases such as this are taken on and allowed sink into consciousness to challenge and stretch us and provoke responses other than our habitual ones. Two commentaries by different authors might be useful:

What does that mean, to dislike? Dislike could mean that you are feeling a strain between how things really are and your story about how things are.

John Tarrant, Bring me the Rhinoceros (and other koans to bring you joy).

‘There is nothing I dislike’ rearranges us profoundly, when we offer ourselves to its energy, its scrutiny, its disturbance in us. This practice is not about tidying up the world and making it clean and bright; it’s about recognizing the world as it is and finding right there the radical freedom of being. The alternative is a kind of carefully scaled-down life. One that is still extravagantly rich in detail and variety and shot through with beauty despite all our efforts, since we live on the blue-green planet, but a scaled-down view of what it was we really wanted while we were here, so very briefly.

Susan Murphy, Upside-Down Zen

Always leaning forward

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Are you so busy in getting to the future that the present moment is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there,’ or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It is a split that tears you apart inside

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Like a blank sheet on a coffee table

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The aim of meditation then, is to let go of the conditions of the mind. This doesn’t mean denying, getting rid of, or judging them. It means not believing them or following them. Instead we listen to them as conditions of the mind that arise and cease. We learn to trust in just being the listener, the watcher, with an attitude of awakened, attentive awareness, rather than be somebody trying to meditate to get some kind of result. Then through mindfulness we are able to get beyond the conditioning of the mind to the pure consciousness that isn’t conditioned, but which is like the background, the emptiness, the blank sheet on which words are written. Our perceptions arise and cease on that blank sheet, that emptiness.

Ajahn Sumedho, True but not right, Right but not true

Solid

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One of the fundamental ways of bringing the mind into the present moment is to focus on how we sense our own body. This bodily sense – that is awareness of the sensations and energies that manifest in the body – is something immediate that we can contemplate. It gives us ground and balance. It gives us the sense of being where we are. Although this may seem basic and obvious, much of the time we are not grounded in where we really are. Instead we are ‘out there’ in a world of changing circumstance and reactions to that, without having a central reference.

Ajahn Sucitto, Meditation: A Way of Awakening

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