Fear – Page 14 – Mindfulbalance

Not getting locked in

February 24, 2012February 26, 2012 Karl Duffy2 Comments

Each time you stay present with fear and uncertainty, you’re letting go of an habitual way of finding security and comfort. All those brain studies about meditation – where they place people in MRI machines or put electrodes on their heads – show us that each time you dare to remain where you are and do something completely fresh, unconventional and non-habitual, you open up new pathways in the brain. You experience that as strength, and it builds your capacity to be open the next time round. [However] it’s not like if you get it right once, if you overcome your jealousy or your anger once, then it’s smooth sailing for the rest of your life. There will be reruns. That means you will have lots and lots of chances to rouse yourself and let go. No need to exaggerate an emotional pattern, fixate on it, fuel it with more thoughts, or go into a tailspin. When you feel the shakiness, when the thoughts start to arise, when the tailspin is beginning, another rerun is in progress. You simply rouse yourself and let yourself be there.

Pema Chodron

Getting places, despite our fears

February 23, 2012February 26, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

We could summarize the whole path into one word: relaxing – relaxing into the nature of your own mind. However when we start to relax, the repressed elements of the body/mind come up – it is like a Pandora’s Box. We discover there is a reason we repressed those elements in the first place – we did not want to deal with them. Meditation gives us a second chance to relate to unwanted experience in a healthy way based on equanimity and acceptance. These “regressive” elements, such as your life falling apart, can be good news. You are starting to get someplace when you come up against barriers of fear and anxiety. What we have been doing in these situations our entire life is running away from them…What is continually whispered into the subconscious mind is to avoid fear at all cost. Unless we address that fear, everything we do is fear-based. Actually, fear is the indicator of where we should go in order to grow. …We spend our entire lives running from this emotion. We need to get to know it, make friends with it. The root of the word fear is “fare”, a toll. Facing fear is the toll we have to pay to become fearless.

Andrew Holocek, Good News: Your Life is Falling Apart.

Practice is about our fears

February 4, 2012February 1, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

Good practice is about fear. Fear takes the form of constantly thinking, speculating, analyzing, fantasizing. With all that activity we create a cloud cover to keep ourselves safe in make-believe practice. True practice is not safe; it’s anything but safe. But we don’t like that, so we obsess with our feverish efforts to achieve our version of the personal dream. Such obsessive practice is itself just another cloud between ourselves and reality. The only thing that matters is seeing with an impersonal searchlight: seeing things as they are. When the personal barrier drops away, why do we have to call it anything? We just live our lives. And when we die, we just die. No problem anywhere.

Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

Ghost Stories at Halloween

October 31, 2011October 28, 2011 Karl Duffy1 Comment

A repost quote from this time last year, reminding us that the mind creates a lot of the dramas in our lives, often making them more frightening than they actually are. These dramas can be about the big and little matters of this day – the days getting darker and winter approaching, the traffic heavier, the relentless nature of work, a difficult meeting…the possibilities are endless. Recognizing that the feelings that these events provoke are simply “mind energies” helps us to work with them and not to give them as much substance as we normally would.

We create big problems for ourselves by not recognizing mind energies when they arrive dressed up as ghosts. They are like the neighbor’s children disguised as Halloween ghosts. When we open the door and find the child next door dressed in a sheet, even though it looks like a ghost, we remember it is simply the child next door. And when I remember the dramas of my life are the energies of the mind dressed up in the sheet of a story, I manage them more gracefully.

Sylvia Boorstein

Cradling our fears

October 23, 2011October 23, 2011 Karl Duffy1 Comment

The essential practice is to cultivate maitri, or loving-kindness. The Shambhala teachings speak of “placing our fearful mind in the cradle of loving-kindness.” Another image for maitri is that of a mother bird who protects and cares for her young until they are strong enough to fly away. People sometimes ask, “Who am I in this image – the mother or the chick. The answer is both….Without loving kindness for ourselves it is difficult if not impossible to genuinely feel it for others

Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty

……and not judging it

October 14, 2011October 15, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

As I have said, nothing that arises in our body and in our life happens outside of our journey, of our path, to full realization. Everything that occurs needs to be welcomed with an attitude of acceptance and openness. No matter what happens, it is imperative that we do not judge it. Especially when we are going through very difficult and trying circumstances, one cannot repeat to oneself too often, “Do not judge it; do not judge it.” Only when we resist the temptation to judge what we are going through can the journey we need to make at this moment continue to unfold, and can we receive the needed development and transformation it may bring.