Tag: Gentleness

Not taking ourselves too seriously

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I faciliated a Day Silent Retreat this weekend which was really a lovely gentle experience. It passed so quickly and all participants expressed a deep contentment with the day and the time they had spent silently sitting or walking. It really confirmed for me how finding some time for quiet in our lives is not a luxury but rather is essential for protecting our health.

Retreat days and reflection aims to develop our capacity to drop into our lives as they actually are. However, sometimes, they can feed into our ever-present need to change or fix ourselves. If this happens, our awareness of  self can become a full-time preoccupation and  take away some of the naturalness of life. It is good that we try to change in ways that allow us become more healthy and happy, but sometimes we can feel pressure to change because of an unconscious sense that we are not good enough or we are unacceptable as we are. Some of the self-help culture visible today feeds into this unhappiness with how we actually are, by continually encouraging us to take on one self-improvement after another. And even noble self-improvement projects, such as “I want to be more calm“, or “I want to be more happy“, can simply substitute one type of discontent with ourselves with another. The reason they do this is that they actually strengthen our premise that we are broken and need fixing.

Even sometimes the reason we come to meditation is precisely because we want to change something inside us. We wish to be calmer, better, more spiritual, more together, more integrated. And if we examine deep enough under that wish we will find that it arisies from a belief that there is something wrong with us as we are. We look to put order on the parts of ourselves that frighten us.

But real life is not necessarily ordered; it is immediate, messy, incomplete. We are in danger of taking things too seriously and not allowing enough room for our chaotic and playful side. Part of the joy and spice of life comes from seeing that our mistakes and wrong turns, our compulsions to do too much, or our tendency to veg out, all add up to our unique personality. The end goal of all our work is not to become some ideal version of ourselves, based on ideas passed on by others or in books. We are to become ourselves fully, with all our quirks and exaggerations. Our natural selves, unaffected; not the one where we pass the time continually checking in on how are doing.

The only way out of this struggle is to leave our mind alone, to fully accept the mind that we have, anger, dualisms and all. And when we no longer judge ourselves or try to emotionally neuter ourselves, the internal conflicts and tensions gradually begin to quiet down. We might say this is the most basic psychological insight: I cannot escape myself, so I have to come to terms with the mind that I have.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness

Working with Negative thoughts, Part 1

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

All of us, from time to time, worry about things. One thing worry does is increase negative thoughts and talking to ourselves. It tends to be anticipatory, referring to threatening things which we come to believe may happen in the future. These thoughts and self-talk have a significant impact upon our mood, making it more difficult for us to be content in our lives at this moment.

There are a number of ways that we can deal with negative thoughts. One very common one is to identify the thoughts and replace them with more constructive or realistic ones. For example, when a person feels bad after a failed job interview and thinks that they will never, ever,  get a job, the overgeneralizing thought is named and a more constructive one – such as “It did not go well this time, but I will prepare better for the next interview”  – is focused on.

The approach that mindfulness takes is slightly different. It simply starts with noticing that all sorts of thoughts are continually arising and passing through the mind. We do this by taking a short period – say two minutes – to sit quietly and calm the mind, not thinking of anything in particular, and just being aware of our breath coming in and going out, say,  at the nostrils. What could be easier? However, what we very quickly notice is that this is not that easy just to be aware of the breath, that we start thinking very quickly.

This is a really important insight along the way towards becoming mindful and in dealing with negative thoughts. We simply notice that it is in the nature of the mind to continually generate thoughts and that they arise and pass away all the time. Some teachers have compared this aspect of the mind to a waterfall, with thoughts thundering or rushing by. There is nothing wrong with this, so we just accept it with gentleness and non-judgment, while returning our attention to the breath.

This is the first step in developing the practical skill of mindfulness. We will move on to the second step in the next, related, post. However, for the moment we just practice this, noticing how the mind wanders and gets distracted.

Mindfulness, seeing clearly, means awakening to the happiness of the uncomplicated moment. We complicate moments. Hardly anything happens without the mind spinning it up into an elaborate production. It’s the elaboration that makes life more difficult than it needs to be.

Sylvia Boorstein

On getting older

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

A lovely poem on getting older:

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

Donald Justice Men at Forty

At times it is necessary to let go of the past as one moves on in life. Doing so, the ground may not feel so solid; it moves, as the poet says, “like the deck of a ship”. However, that movement is gentle, partly because of the wisdom, experience and skills built up over the years. There is something beautiful about the use of the word “softly” at the end of the second line. Moving on can be done with full acceptance, with a face turned toward future adventures, with an understanding of the passing of time.