Tag: Be fully present

This moment!

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Most of life only lasts a moment. Then our life becomes a memory,  a dream. We are only alive a millisecond at a time. This moment! Or as one teacher puts it, holding his thumb and forefinger about a quarter-inch apart  “All of life is only just this much – about a moment at a time”. When we open to the very instant in which awareness produces consciousness, we are fully alive. Completely present. Big-minded. To the degree that we are present for “just this much”, this living moment, we are alive. Otherwise we numb to the vibrancy,  and beg upon our deathbed for just one more chance.

Stephen and Ondrea Levine, Embracing the Beloved.

Not waiting for some future perfection

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Maybe we think that someday we will have gained perfect maturity from the lessons of our lives. Subconsciously,  we are lured by the expectation that we will reach a stage where we don’t have to fix anything ever again. One day we will reach “happily ever after” We are convinced of the notion of “resolution”. It’s as if everything that we’ve experienced up until now, our whole lives up to this moment, was a dress rehearsal. We believe that our grand performance is yet to come, so we do not live for today. For most people this endless managing, rearranging, upgrading is the definition of “living”. In reality we are waiting for our life to start. When prodded, most of us admit that we are working toward some future moment of perfection – retirement in a log cabin in Kennebunkport or in a hut in Costa Rica. Or maybe we dream of living out our later years in the idealized forest landscape…serenly meditating …..overlooking a waterfall and koi pond.

Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, What makes you not a Buddhist.

The basics of Mindfulness practice 5 : Becoming a witness

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to your own experience. To do this requires that you become aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experience and learn to step back from it.

When we begin practicing paying attention to the activity of our own mind, it is common to discover that we are constantly generating judgments about our experience.

Jon Kabat Zinn

The basics of Mindfulness practice 3: Use the breath to centre yourself

Karl Duffy2 Comments

 Breath is the bridge that connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold again.

In our community, where people are practicing the mindfulness of doing laundry, washing dishes, eating, walking and so forth, everybody learns to use breath as a tool for restoring mindfulness.

Thich Nhat Hahn

The basics of Mindfulness practice 1 : Stay in the “Now”

Karl Duffy2 Comments

As a new MBSR group started last night in Geneva, I will post for the next week some texts to support anyone just starting to practice strengthening their awareness and focusing the mind, a kind of basic foundation for mindfulness.  For regular readers of the blog, they will be familiar quotes by now. However, as I have said before, practice is essentially the same for everyone – starting over and over again, re-minding ourselves to be present to our lives, as the mind wanders. We are all learning and starting over each day, as we again and again find ourselves far away from the “now”:

There is no other time than now. We are not, contrary to what we think, “going” anywhere. It will never be more rich in some other moment than in this one. Although we may imagine that some future moment will be more pleasant, or less, than this one, we can’t really know. But whatever the future brings, it will not be what you expect, or what you think, and when it comes, it will be now too. It too will be a moment that can be very easily missed, just as easily missed as this one.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Empty branches

Karl Duffy1 Comment

To have loved is everything,
I loved, once, a hummingbird who came every afternoon– the freedom-loving male–

who flew by himself to sample the sweets of the garden, to sit on a high, leafless branch with his red throat gleaming.

And then, he came no more.
And I’m still waiting for him, ten years later,

to come back, and he will, or he will not.
There is a certain commitment that each of us is given,
that has to do with another world,

if there is one.
I remember you, hummingbird.
I think of you every day even as I am still here,
soaked in color, waiting year after honey-rich year.

Mary Oliver, An Empty Branch in the Orchard