Tag: Be fully present

Noticing our Wandering Mind

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Unlike other animals, human beings spend a lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them, contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or will never happen at all. Indeed, “stimulus-independent thought” or “mind wandering” appears to be the brain’s default mode of operation… Our mental lives are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the nonpresent. A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of people’s happiness. In fact, how often our minds leave the present and where they tend to go is a better predictor of our happiness than the activities in which we are engaged…. [So] ..The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.

Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind”, Science Magazine

Addicted to thinking

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Most of the time we are not aware of being alive. We are too busy living. Our daily dramas, plans and desires fill our minds: we are addicted storytellers (both waking and sleeping) constantly rehearsing scripts and scenarios that we wish to arise or that may arise. The more mental energy we give our stories, the faster they spin and the more intense the experience becomes. It is powerfully addictive and feeds on itself. It is the ultimate drug and like any drug, increasing amounts are needed to maintain the intensity. Should the intensity drop for any length of time, we believe that something has gone wrong…If we run out of fantasies to pursue, we say that life has become meaningless.

Simon Small, From the Bottom of the Pool

Keeping our attention on what is in front of us

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The lighthouse illuminates in a single beam of light. The monk rakes the sand in the garden in front of him. We try to keep our minds focused on the moment in hand, on the next breath in practice. We do not have to live the whole of the future now, just this moment, this breath.

Its vision sweeps its one path
like an aged monk raking a garden,
his question long ago answered or moved on.
Far off, night-grazing horses,
breath scented with oatgrass and fennel,
step through it, disappear, step through it, disappear

Jane Hirshfield, Lighthouse

Forget climbing

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A woman said to Suzuki Roshi that she found it difficult to mix practice with the demands of being a householder. “I feel that I am trying to climb a ladder, but for every step upwards I slip back two steps” “Forget the ladder” Suzuki Roshi told her. “When you are awake everything is right here on the ground” He explained how the desire to gain anything means you miss the reality of the present. “When you realize the truth that everything changes, and find your composure in it, there you find yourself…” The goal is to let go of anything special and meet each moment with beginners mind.

Jack Kornfield, “Enlightenment” in Inquiring Mind

When we live best

Karl Duffy1 Comment

But the silence in the mind is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence we call God. This is the deep
calling to deep of the psalm-writer, the bottomless ocean.
We launch the armada of
our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins;
that calls us out over our own fathoms. What to do but draw a little nearer to
such ubiquity by remaining still?

R.S Thomas

Blessed by everything we meet

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The more alert we become to the blessings that flow into us from everything we touch,

the more our own touch will bring blessing.

Br. David Stendl-Rast