heart – Page 192 – 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.

Running after our life

February 23, 2012February 21, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

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

February 21, 2012February 19, 2012 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

Why we should take ourselves lightly

February 20, 2012February 21, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

We often think that the way forward lies in us putting a lot of work into our life, hoping to improve and fix what we do not like. And we can bring that attitude to meditation also, seeing it as something I am doing, and something I have got to do. However, just as one of the big problems in meditation is that we can take ourselves too seriously, we also need to realize that a big step towards contentment lies in letting some things go or not holding on too tightly to the succession of energies that appear in the mind, both positive “improving” ones as well as the ones that are arise from difficult events or people. Now to say this sounds quite simple. But the tendency of the mind is to hold onto most things and make them into problems. We don’t have the faith or the trust or the willingness to just totally let go in the moment, to allow things pass through lightly, rather than amplifying them and making them into a story about our value or our life. Where meditation helps is in coming to see that the mind is continually generating stories and fears, and that holding one to every one can become quite tiring. Letting go our our inflated sense of the importance of our dramas can be liberating. The image in this poem may help – as a way of dealing with thoughts in meditation, as a way of dealing with our preoccupation with “me” and “I”, as a way of dealing with our tendency to improve and fix and fret.

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“don’t love your life
too much,” it said,
and vanished into the world.

Mary Oliver, One or Two Things