Tag: heart

Simple Daily Practices: Transform your moments of waiting.

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When we are forced to wait, say in a traffic jam, our instinct is to do something to distract ourselves from the discomfort of waiting. We turn on the radio, call or text someone on the phone, or just sit and fume. Practicing mindfulness while waiting helps people find many small moments in the day when they can bring the thread of awareness up from where is lies hiding in the complex fabric of their lives. Waiting, a common event that usually produces negative emotions, can be transformed into a gift, the gift of free time to practice. The mind benefits doubly: first, by abandoning negative mindstates, and second, by gaining the beneficial effects of even a few extra minutes of practice woven into the day.

Jan Chozen Bays

Creating one’s life

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Exister, c’est changer; changer, c’est mûrir; mûrir,c’est se créer sans cesse.

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating yourself without ceasing.

Henri-Louis Bergson, French Philosopher.

More on Pausing

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If right now our emotional reaction to seeing a certain person or hearing certain news is to fly into a rage or to get despondent or something equally extreme, it’s because we have been cultivating that particular habit for a very long time. But as my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, we can approach our lives as an experiment. In the next moment, in the next hour, we could choose to stop, to slow down, to be still for a few seconds. We could experiment with interrupting the usual chain reaction, and not spin off in the usual way. We don’t need to blame someone else, and we don’t need to blame ourselves.  Pausing is very helpful in this process. It creates a momentary contrast between being completely self-absorbed and being awake and present. You just stop for a few seconds, breathe deeply, and move on. In the middle of just living, which is usually a pretty caught-up experience characterized by a lot of internal discussion, you just pause.

Pema Chodron, The Power of the Pause, O Magazine

…and not a wanting mind

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“Wanting” is a universal phenomenon, and our mental list of what we want is seemingly endless. We wake up in the morning and ask “What do I want today? What do I want to eat, what do I want to buy, how much do I want” Wanting, when it goes beyond our basic, ordinary needs, is an expression of a longing for something either more than or different from what we already have,. There is a sense of being fundamentally unfulfilled. It is well worth looking more deeply into the nature of wanting, recognizing how you know wanting is there, and naming it. When you become familiar with recognizing and naming wanting, then it will become easier to notice when are captured, and therefore you will more likely be able to free yourself. The practice fo mindfulness is a fundamental way of becoming more familiar with your mind, and getting used to observing how mind states arise, are noted, and then dissolve. With practice you can become better at noticing the “I want” state of mind, letting it arise, and letting it go.

Sasha Loring, How to Tame the Wanting Mind

Having a quiet mind…..

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Can you be happy where you are, in your life, at this moment?

If this was a problem in Pascal’s time – more than 300 years ago – it is even more so today. IN a world increasingly driven by the need to achieve, and by advertising, media and social networking, we can physically be in one place but miles away from it in our mind and in the thoughts and aspirations which the images produce. I was reminded of this yesterday, standing in line in a boulangerie – in a beautiful place beside the sea and palm trees – when the man in front of me said “Yes, my body may be on holidays, but my mind is still in the office”. This difficulty to switch off – even in a place of great natural beauty – makes it hard for us to be where we are at this moment, physically, but also in the sense of being with what is the realiuty of our life at this actual time in our history. We find ourselves living in our thoughts, dreams and worries, and strangely sometimes seem to prefer to be there.

All man’s miseries derive from not being
able to sit quietly in a room alone.

Blaise Pascal, French Philosopher.


Open to us now

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The seed of suffering in you may be strong,

but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.

Thich Nhat Hahn