heart – Page 212 – Mindfulbalance

Not believing the propaganda of Moods

November 11, 2011November 11, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Our moods can be strong at times, and may be so at times today, but they are not the most reliable place to look if we want to get a true picture of our own worth or of what to do. In the long-term they rarely give correct messages about our lasting happiness.They frequently get in the way of us experiencing what is happening directly, and we lose a lot of the richness which is before us each day, as we are caught in these strong internal states.

Moods come with grand words and general ideas, but as intelligences they are less than we are, prone to think in terms of the best and the worst, and to make unnecessary comparisons that squeeze out life. At sunset there is no best or worst..….. A mood can only remove us from the evening’s sharpness. It is common to think of moods and despairs as genuinely earned and as part of our personality but that is their deception – they are propaganda from the Ministry of Despair and the Department of Grandiosity. When Psyche turns away from them, when the meditation continues to plod humbly along, these moods, like other old advertisements, wither and grow stale.

John Tarrant, The Light inside the Dark

When stressed, shift attention

November 10, 2011November 10, 2011 Karl Duffy2 Comments

On the same theme as recent posts, but applying it as a practical way of dealing with the stresses and crises that arise during our working day. This is an easy-to-apply way of breaking the cycle of stress reactivity – divert your attention to your physical environment, like the touch of your hands on the keyboard, your breathing, or your feet in contact with the floor. See if you can create a small break from the spinning of the mind by tuning into the sensations of the body.

To gain composure at stressful moments, we can apply the mindfulness effort of letting go – abruptly shifting our attention from our thoughts to the immediacy of our physical environment. By suddenly being mindful in this way, we discover a stillness, an emotional space of “not knowing” , like opening a door to an unknown room or leaping from a diving board. When we are mindful in the immediate moment, the chaotic flood of emotions no longer vies for our attention like a crowd of loud, unruly voices. Instead they focus and settle into a physical feeling, unclear and murky, but no less powerful – a tickle in the stomach, a vague softness around the heart, or an openenss in the throat.

Michael Carroll, At Times of Risk and Stress, Cultivate Stillness

Why we get stuck

November 9, 2011November 8, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We all have stuck places, and generally we know them, yet we remain stuck. Why? Does knowledge not make it possible to become unstuck? Yes and no. We remain stuck because beneath the surface our stuckness is wired to a complex. When we approach that stuck place, we activate energies below the visual range, and they in turn fuel the engines of anxiety. This anxiety has the power to flood the ego and shut down alternative choices. We are not aware this internal governance system has just usurped our lives, but we feel immediately more comfortable that it has. This wiring, which connects anxiety with ego, always has its origin in the past, often a disempowered past. This circuitry, which imposes history into the present, is why we stay stuck. By implication, getting unstuck demands that one be willing to bear the anxiety occasioned by the invisible circuitry beneath consciousness.

James Hollis, On this Journey we Call Our Life

Grey days

November 9, 2011November 9, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The past few days have dawned quite grey, and this has hardly lifted at all during the course of the day. Like all other types of weather this can be a useful metaphor for the mind. We frequently fall into the trap of thinking that we see things directly and clearly, when rather it is truer to say that we see them through the filters of our mental and emotional conditioning. For example, we often expand a lot of energy worrying about future events, many of which never came to pass in the manner imagined. It is as Mark Twain said, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened”. However this does not prevent us from believing that we see the clearly what is going to happen, when in actual fact we am looking through the fog of our own interests and fears. This means a lot of our energy goes into not what is actually happening in that moment, but into the anticipations of what may happen in the future.

One of the reasons for meditation is the cultivation of clear seeing. We practice meditation to strengthen our ability to pay attention to this moment instead of getting lost in the fog that we’re usually in. It is one way of trying to see the world clearly, and not getting stuck in the wanderings of our minds, no matter what is the changing “weather” of our moods or experiences. To do this we try to sit under all kinds of circumstances, whether we are well or sick, whether we’re in a good mood or down, whether we feel our meditation is going well or is completely falling apart. In this way we develop a consistency. and see that meditation is rather about staying with ourselves, in this moment, no mater what that is like. Clear seeing starts with becoming aware of some of the habitual patterns in our thinking, our defense mechanisms, and the ways we rehearse life, rather than live it directly

“This is an essential discovery: our experience of life and the world is strongly flavoured by our own internal cycles of mental weather – sunny, foggy, rainy, sunny, misty, cloudy – and around and around we go: jealous, proud, anxious, craving, excited, deflated. When we look closely we see that we have deeply ingrained habits of distracting ourselves from the present.”

Gaylon Ferguson Natural Wakefulness