Tag: Be fully present

Losing contact with basic goodness

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Flowers book

The losing of paradise is enacted over and over again by the children of Adam and Eve. We clothe our souls with messages and doctrines, and lose contact with the great life in the naked breast of nature

Rabindranath Tagore

Does the rose have to do something? No, the purpose of a rose is to be a rose. Your purpose is to be yourself. You don’t have to run anywhere to become someone else. You are wonderful just the way you are. This teaching …. allows us to enjoy ourselves, the blue sky, and everything that is refreshing and healing in the present moment. We already have everything we are looking for, everything we want to become. I am happy in the present moment. I do not ask for anything else. I do not expect any additional happiness. Aimlessness is stopping and realizing the happiness that is already available.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Learning from nature

Karl Duffy1 Comment

springbuds

Meditation is really just learning to enjoy your experience, so you don’t have to tense up. Don’t make meditation a project like everything else. The word “natural” is very important. Yesterday I was walking around and it was so beautiful here….We appreciate nature because it’s so uncontrived and unselfconscious. Bring that to mind and know that the body itself has its own intelligence.

Elizabeth Matthis-Namgyel, in Pema Chodron on 4 Keys to Waking Up

The Basics of practice 2: Be patient with the mind

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Monkey Leap.jpg

The biggest hindrance to (mindfulness) is constant intrusive thoughts. This is normal for everyone and from the beginning you should expect it. The nature of our mind is to think, and it is childish to imagine that we can simply turn that process off when we wish to.

Our minds have been almost completely out of control for most of our life. Recognizing this can help us to be practical and patient — it may take us some time and a lot of skillful practice to tame the crazy “monkey mind.”

Bob Sharples

photp mahbub shaheed

Like bubbles

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:First Time Bubble (4718544475).jpg

One of the funny things about learning to look into the mind is that normally that’s the last place we ever look! If you consider the way we normally think, we carry on an endless dialogue with ourselves full of memories, justifications, anticipations, commentaries, fantasies, daydreams and so on. We just keep thinking, comparing, analyzing. And we believe what we think. I have  my beliefs, they are true because that’s what I believe! What I like must be good because I like it!…..The aim of meditation practice is to first teach us how to quiet the mind and then to look into the mind itself. It teaches us how to distance ourselves from our thoughts and emotions and to see them as just thoughts and emotions. They are mental states. They arise for a short time, then they disappear, then another state arises. They are like bubbles. Our problem is not that we have thoughts and emotions but that we identify with them.

Ani Tenzin Palmo, Reflections on a Mountain Lake

photo serge melki

The Basics of Practice 1: Learning by doing

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I am starting a number of mindfulness courses these days and so the first posts this week will be on the basics of practice. However, in a sense, we all start over each day, each new week, each moment, discovering how little we actually like to be in the present moment….

Cultivating mindfulness is not unlike the process of eating. It would be absurd to propose that someone else eat for you. And when you go to a restaurant, you don’t eat the menu, mistaking it for the meal, nor are you nourished by listening to the waiter describe the food. You have to actually eat the food for it to nourish you. In the same way, you have to actually practice mindfulness in order to reap its benefits and come to understand why it is so valuable.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Letting life’s lessons sink in

Karl Duffy1 Comment

allondon1 rocks

Another post inspired by the season of Lent, but a reminder for all of the value in slowing down, making space, “meandering” in life, rather than always focusing on driven, purpose-filled activities.

More than giving up or self-denial, Lent, when practiced intentionally, can allow time for self-examination, reflection, and preparation. It’s a time of slowing down, intentionally, so that life is given a chance to sink in, not just run off in so many directions. Induced meandering, if you will.  The slowing that is an inherent part of Lent is not just for the sake of slowing down, but so that life can sink in. In so doing, this season of irrigation provides health and vitality long after its rains have passed. Lent offers us an opportunity to slow down, to meander rather than to rush, to allow life to sink in a bit, to find ways to go deeper and not always stay on the surface. A time to observe, to pay attention, and then to act — and in so doing provide the space to move from rush to replenish. When we take this practice seriously, we plant its blessings so that they benefit not only us in our lives for this season, but also extend to the world around us.

Erin Dunigan, The Induced Meandering of the Lenten Season