Tag: heart

What makes our roots strong

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Challenges develop fortitude and strength…One of the biggest problems for astronauts living in space is the loss of bone mass due to zero-gravity. With no gravity to resist the astronauts become weaker. In the biological big-bubble experiment  known as Biosphere 2, the trees eventually had to be attached by cables to the framework above. This is because there was no wind in the Biosphere , and with nothing to resist the trees became weak and needed support. Similarly, without something to work against – without situations of some gravity – our body and mind begin to atrophy. We need something to press against in life in order to stay strong and grow.

Andrew Holecek, The Power and the Pain: Transforming Spiritual Hardship into Joy

Giving full attention to each thing today

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Attention means focus, it means simplicity, it means giving your attention to one thing, one person at one time. Not in a fixated compulsive addictive way, but to be able to really give yourself, at that moment, to the person you are with. Learning to meditate is learning to pay attention. It is the art of attention in the simplest purest most immediate way. When you sit to meditate you let go of all the 1001 different things that are going on in the head. But don’t underestimate how distracted you are. It’s not easy, so don’t expect it to be easy. But it is simple. And because it is simple, anyone can do it who really wishes to do it, and is humble enough to keep coming back to it and learn, day by day, little by little, how to pay attention.

Laurence Freeman,  Benedictine monk

Not getting locked in

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

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.

Running after our life

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When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.  Lao Tzu

At some point, our life can become machine like. We find ourselves running on automatic pilot, without any clear sense of purpose – our momentum fuelled by a chronic sense of need, a vague feeling that something is missing on our life. Nothing is enough to relieve the pressure that we feel. So we keep on with our superhuman efforts to design a life that looks like the happiness we imagine. But when it depends on material things or external valuations, happiness has a history of being short-lived.

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Erring and Erring, we walk the Unerring Path

The one who knows

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Every time I reacted negatively, pushing things away, that action implied that there was something to fear. That this feeling or this thought was dangerous; that it was going to really hurt me, or invade me; that it was something that was really me and mine. As I began to welcome it all I realised that when you accept everything, only then can you sense that, after all, there is nothing to fear. None of it really belongs to a self or comes from a self. It cannot touch the mind which knows, cannot affect its nature. Whatever shape of vessel you pour the water into, with this same total accommodation, the water changes to the shape of the bottle. It doesn’t say: ‘I will not be poured into a square bottle, square bottles are not my scene. Round bottles only, please!’  When there is complete acceptance, there is just the sense of being the knowing, being that which is aware of all that comes through the mind.

Ajahn Amaro