Tag: heart

However your day is

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It is the imperative in the mind that this moment somehow be different, that causes suffering. Peace is possible, here and now, in the middle of the world, in the middle of a life, in the middle of a body, in the middle of however you are and however the world is. Change may or may not happen in a way that we like. But the mind has a capability of saying “It’s like this, and I can manage it”, without creating extra difficulty. There is a path to peace. The path is a doable, cultivable skill of awareness in the mind.

Sylvia Boorstein, Greet this moment as a Friend

The ordinary mystery

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Ordinariness is a simple presence in this moment that allows the mystery of life to show itself. When Thoreau warns us to “beware of any activity that requires the purchase of new clothes” he reminds us that simplicity is the way we open to everyday wonder. While consciousness can create a variety of forms, ordinariness is interested in what is here and now. This is the ordinary mystery of breathing or of walking, the mystery of trees on our streets or of loving someone near to us. It is not based on attaining mystical states or extraordinary powers. It does  not seek to become something special, but is emptying, listening.

Jack Kornfield, Bringing home the Dharma

The basic instructions

Karl Duffy3 Comments

 

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Mary Oliver, Sometimes

A way of being with the joyful and the painful

Karl Duffy3 Comments

If we practice mindfulness, we get in touch with the refreshing and joyful aspects of life in us and around us, the things we are not able to touch when we live in forgetfulness.  Mindfulness makes things like our eyes, our heart, our non-toothache, the beautiful moon and the trees deeper and more beautiful.  If we touch these wonderful things with mindfulness, they will reveal their full splendor. 

[But also]..when we touch our pain with mindfulness, we will begin to transform it.  When a baby is crying in the living room, his mother goes in right away to hold him tenderly in her arms. Because mother is made of love and tenderness, when she does that, love and tenderness penetrate the baby and, in only a few minutes, the baby will probably stop crying.  Mindfulness is the mother who cares for your pain every time it begins to cry.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Touching Peace

A way of working with emotions when we feel flooded

Karl Duffy1 Comment

As I referred to recently, I was in the UK last week on a retreat directed by Ajahn Sucitto. So I quote him here, partly in reference to the very unseasonal weather they are having there, with communities struggling with severe flooding. Like most weather conditions, flooding can help us in our reflection on the mind, on how to work with  things that we cannot control, or things in our life change without us expecting them.

Mindfulness, the ability to bear witness is a tremendously powerful and skilful factor of mind. The Buddha called mindfulness the floodstopper. It stops the floods of greed, hatred and delusion. With mindfulness we give ourselves a choice with regard to following what arises in the mind; and keeping that choice available is something you want to go on doing because the mind almost longs to get trapped – and there are plenty of sights, sounds, flavours and ideas that can sweet you away out of aware responsibility. As we carry our body with us all the time, we can use that as a base for mindfulness; a place where we can stop the floods. We can turn our attention to the body and just refer to the body in the body, as it is – that is as sensations, energies and form, rather than the impressions of beauty or ugliness that identification imposes upon it.

Ajahn Sucitto, Seeing the Way.

Fearlessness

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When we slow down, when we relax with our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle. Sadness hits you in your heart, and your body produces a tear. Before you cry there is a feeling in your chest and then, after that, you produce tears in your eyes. You are about to produce rain or  waterfall in your eyes and you feel sad and lonely and perhaps romantic all at the same time. This is the first tip of fearlessness, and the first sign of real warriorship. You might think that, when you experience fearlessness, you will hear the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or see a great explosion in the sky, but it doesn’t happen that way. Discovering fearlessness comes from working with the softness of the human heart.

Elizabeth Lesser