Tag: heart

A friendly space for all experience

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Mindfulness practice allows us to create a more spacious mind when we’re actually involved in our walking-around activities. This gives us that ability to actually check-in with our subjective experience, instead of just reacting out of our subjective experience….. it actually kind of stops you in your tracks; and you can have this “holding” of your own experience where you can continue to experience without doing the verbal or nonverbal or emotional reactivity that people do place on each other. It allows you to be able to have your own experience; and then a bit of freedom to respond to whatever is going on.

So here’s a definition of mindfulness: it’s a strengthening of your concentration so that you can be more precise and clear in recognizing your experience. It’s also a strengthening of your equanimity — your ability to be relaxed and open in the face of your experience. The concentration part of mindfulness is a little like drinking a cup of coffee; it kind of wakes you up. It’s like the straight spine of arousal or awareness. The equanimity part is like the relaxed limbs of the body. The spine is straight, and the limbs are relaxed. This relaxation part is a receptivity and acceptance to things as they are. It’s a kind of “friendly audience” to your own experience; a sort of “Hello. Wow! OK.” attitude — a gentle, matter-of-fact awareness of your experience, rather than a reactive pulling back.  All mindfulness practices cultivate both of those, the concentration and the equanimity, so that you can be clearer, more precise and more relaxed in the face of whatever is happening to you —whether it’s loud noises coming in from a jackhammer running in the next building, or a pain in your knee, or your emotions about your spouse.

Polly Young-Eisendrath

Hold on lightly – let feelings pass through awareness

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Meditation is a special kind of dance in which we commit ourselves wholeheartedly to the practice of deconstructing the materialistic view of reality. The challenge is simultaneously to hold on and to let go; it is to see clearly what we are doing and at the same time see through it.

Ajahn Amaro

When you think you are not “good enough”

Karl Duffy2 Comments

The goalposts for what counts as “good enough”  always seem to be out of reach. No matter how well we do, someone else always seems to be doing it better. The result of this line of thinking is sobering: Millions of people who need to take pharmaceuticals every day just to cope with daily life. Insecurity, anxiety, and depression are incredibly common in our society, and much of this is due to self-judgment, to beating ourselves up when we feel we aren’t winning in the game of life.

So what’s the answer? To stop judging and evaluating ourselves altogether. To stop trying to label ourselves as “good” or “bad” and simply accept ourselves with an open heart. To treat ourselves with the same kindness, caring, and compassion we would show to a good friend — or even a stranger,  for that matter. Self-compassion provides an island of calm, a refuge from the stormy seas of endless positive and negative self-judgment, so that we can finally stop asking, “Am I as good as they are? Am I good enough?” By tapping into our inner wellsprings of kindness, acknowledging the shared nature of our imperfect human condition, we can start to feel more secure, accepted, and alive.

It does take work to break the self-criticizing habits of a lifetime, but at the end of the day, you are only being asked to relax, allow life to be as it is, and open your heart to yourself. It’s easier than you might think, and it could change your life.

Kristan Neff, Why Self-Compassion trumps Self-Esteem

How to let go of sorrows

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When we enter the present moment deeply, our regrets and sorrows disappear, and we discover life with all its wonders. Breathing in, we say to ourselves, “I have arrived.”  Breathing out, we say,”I am home.” When we do this, we overcome dispersion and dwell peacefully in the present moment, which is the only moment for us to be alive.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Walking Meditation

The energy that is in our fear

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When we come face to face with the fear and pain in our psyche, we stand at the gateway to tremendous renewal and freedom. Our deepest nature is awareness, and when we fully inhabit that, we love freely and are whole… When we stop fighting the energy that has been bound in fear, it naturally releases into the boundless sea of awareness. The more we awaken from the grip of fear, the more radiant and free becomes the heart. 

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

How you talk to yourself

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Your way of explaining events to yourself determines how helpless you can become, or how energized, when you encounter the everyday setbacks as well as momentous defeats.

Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism