Tag: heart

Appreciate uncertainty

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Fear and anxiety are the dominant psychological states of the human mind. Behind the fear lies a constant longing to be certain. We are afraid of the unknown. The mind’s craving for confirmation is rooted in our fear of uncertainty. Fearlessness is generated when you can appreciate uncertainty, when you have faith in the impossibility of these interconnected components remaining static and permanent. You will find yourself, in the true sense, preparing for the worst while allowing for the best. You will become dignified and majestic.

Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, What Makes you not a Buddhist

Being as fluid as life itself is

Karl Duffy2 Comments

It seems to me that fear is more basic than the emotions. It comes from our basic confusion. Fear touches on the most basic aspect of the human dilemma: “How do we live in an uncertain world?”  We understand this when we sit to practice. We don’t really know what to do with our experience. We either get lost in our thoughts or try to suppress them. Somehow, we can’t find our resting place with the energy and expression of our mind. It can feel overwhelming – scary. … So we can say that, due to our inability to relax around experience, we contract in fear or get lost in our confusion. It says in the teachings that this “overwhelm” causes us to cling tightly. This experience of clinging tightly is what we misunderstand as the self. We continue to look for stability and security, and yet the world (our inner and outer worlds) is not a static situation. What we experience as a self, we could say, is a continued desire for happiness and freedom from suffering. The problem we have is that there is so much bewilderment around our experience and not knowing what to do with it, we contract out of fear…..There is panic, which is a frozen,  very physical,  sensation. Our breath gets shallow. We feel like life is something happening to us, rather than feeling a part of the bigness of life.

But however contracted we get,  life continues to flow.…no matter how tightly we hold on. We can’t separate ourselves from life. Even a fortress is part of life. And even as a fortress we are still in relationship with life and our mind. That we are part of the great interdependence of life means that actually, we are very, very big – infinite, in fact.  So the purpose of practice is to find our true relationship with life, rather than contract. Trying to create security in a world that is fluid is a good definition of pain/samsara. The purpose is to value life and let it touch us and change us – so that we can be as fluid as life, which is a poignant and beautiful, freeing and emboldening experience.

Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, Moving Beyond Fear

The important things cannot be rushed

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Too often, our results-oriented mood also spills over into our spiritual practices. We want to get as much as possible, as quickly as possible, from as little commitment as possible. I pick up on this after the meditation sessions I lead where people get a glimpse into how unpredictable and completely scattered their minds are. Even though everyone tries their level best to keep the mind focused, the mind escapes to a thought, a plan, a conversation, or a fantasy without the individual even realizing that it went somewhere. This experience often inspires them to ask me, “How long did it take you to control your mind?” My response every single time is, “I’m still trying.”

It seems as if we have a need to accomplish something. We’re always trying to reach the finish line so that we can feel a sense of completion and move on to something else. However, meditation and spirituality are never quite like that. The other day, someone wrote me a question on Facebook: “What is the fastest way for one to remove one’s bad karma?” I responded by saying, “I wish there was a fast way to burn off karma. The purpose of karma is not only to give us a reaction for our positive or negative actions, but also to teach us valuable lessons about life, our character and behavior, and our interactions with others. These things in life usually can’t be rushed. Otherwise, we wouldn’t learn from them.”

Gadadhara Pandit Dasa, Fast Food Spirituality in the Huffington Post, 19 June 2012.

Some thoughts on fear…

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Very early we all begin our attempt to protect ourselves against the threatening occurrences that pop up regularly. In the fear caused by them, we begin to contract. And the open, spacious character of our young life feels pushed through a funnel into a bottleneck of fear. Once we begin to use language the rapidity of this contracting increases. And particularly as our intelligence grows, the process becomes really speedy: now we not only try to handle the threat by storing it in every cell of our body, but (using memory) we relate each new threat to all of the previous ones – and so the process compounds itself.

Charlotte Joko Beck

…and letting go of an idea of perfection

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When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves–from other people, relationships, or material goods–or from our own self-development, we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion. But according to Buddhism, such a strategy is doomed. Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.

Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

Doing nothing

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform: and often it is quite beyond his power. We must first recover the possession of our own being before we can act wisely or taste any experience in its human reality.

Thomas Merton