A useful technique involves working with awareness of body touch-points. These are the parts of the body that come into contact with other objects in the course of each day, such as the bottoms of our feet as we move about, or the felt sense of sitting in a chair, or of our hands touching something. We bring our attention to a touch-point as often as we can remember. This is useful in breaking our habitual mental and emotional patterns.
Narayan Liebenson Grady
There are many simple practices that support the transformation of the mind. These are easy to do at any time throughout the day and prevent us from getting caught in patterns of preoccupation. One practice is to relax the body, particularly the eyes and face, whenever we can remember. When the face is more open and the eyes are soft, the mind tends to connect with the present moment with increasing ease. We have found that this particular practice supports the letting go of powerful and unconscious habits of mind. We can disentangle ourselves more rapidly from those thoughts, feelings and sensations that consistently propel us into the next moment. we can settle into the here and now without always attaching to some agenda of what should or shouldn’t be happening.
Michael Liebenson Grady
This beautiful quotation from French Philosopher, Simone Weil, could be describing the practice of mindfulness, with its emphasis on the need to move away from just thinking and opening to a wider attention. By paying atttention, even to the simplest details of each day, we create space for a deeper wisdom to grow.
As long as a person tolerates having his inner self full of his own thoughts, of his personal thoughts, he is entirely submitted – even in his most intimate thoughts – to the constraint of needs and the mechanical play of force. But everything changes when, by virtue of real attention, he empties his soul to let the thoughts of eternal wisdom pass through it. He then carries in himself the very thoughts to which force is submitted.
Simone Weil
Nobody sees a flower – really – it is so small it takes time
– we haven’t time – and to see takes time,
like to have a friend takes time.
Georgia O’Keeffe, American Painter.
Here, Ajahn Sumedho explains meditation so well – in a beautifully straightforward manner – that nothing needs to be added. The words are, at the same time, both simple and profound. It is an overall explanation but also a practical guide. However, our habitual desire to fix ourselves and change our life circumstances make it more complicated than it needs to be. We seem afraid to believe that the goal we are seeking lies in simply relating to our life directly, without judgement, just as we find it, moment to moment. Can you – today – allow things to be what they are?
For many people the attitude towards meditation is one of always trying to change something, always trying to attain a particular state or recreate some kind of blissful experience remembered from the past, or of hoping to reach a certain state by practising. When we practise meditation with the idea of having to do something, however, then even the idea of practice ― even the word ‘meditation’ ― will bring up this idea that ‘if I’m in a bad mood, I should get rid of it’, or ‘if the mind is scattered and I’m all over the place, I should make it one-pointed’. In other words, we make meditation into hard work. So then there is a great deal of failure in it because we try to control everything through these ideas.
The goal of meditation is to see things as they are; it is a state of awakened attention. And this is a very simple thing. It isn’t complicated or difficult or something that takes years to achieve. It is so easy, in fact, that you don’t even notice it. When you think in terms of having to practise meditation, you are conceiving it as something you have to attain …….. you have to control your emotions, you have to develop virtues in order to attain some kind of ideal state of mind. You might have images of a lot of yogis sitting in remote places on mountain tops and in caves. ….. and it all sounds very remote and very far from what you can expect from your life as a human being. The point is to look at meditation as awakenedness and awareness throughout daily life in whatever way we live and in whatever conditions. There is in that the sense of allowing things to be in this present moment, allowing whatever way the body is or the emotional and mental states right now to be the way they are. Just be the observer of whatever is. Right now the mood is ‘this’, ‘I feel this’. Just be aware whether you are confused, indifferent, happy, sad, uncertain or whatever. Be that which allows things to be what they are.
Ajahn Sumedho
We are in the midst of one of the most profound cognitive shifts in our intellectual history, moving from a “deep attention” to a “hyper attention” society, to quote Duke University professor Katherine Hayles. She defines “deep attention” as the cognitive preference for input from only a single information stream, to be engaged for an extended period. “Hyper attention,” by contrast, is marked by a hunger for a high level of stimulation and a desire to shift rapidly among different information streams. Surfing the Internet while IM’ing and watching a YouTube video, all with music playing in the background: Yes. Reading 100 pages of a novel in one sitting or writing a term paper: No. Evidence of this shift can be found just about everywhere in our culture…. And so one must ask: Where in our culture do we encourage sustained thinking and provide a quiet, reflective space to ponder, reflect and develop ideas?
Vanessa Silberman, Mindfulness, Focusing the Mind’s Eye in the Digital Age, Dot Magazine.
