Tag: heart

Staying with the feeling

Karl Duffy1 Comment

This statement by Tara Brach contains the essence of practice: All of our reactions to people, to situations, to thoughts in our mind – are actually reactions to the kind of sensations that are arising in our body.

See if you can practice this today: Notice the sensations in your body, before thinking sets in. Notice how the body reacts to pleasant and unpleasant events or experiences.  Stay with fear as a feeling in the body before it gets to thoughts or emotions.  Can you allow the sensation just remain a sensation in the body? Can you stop judging your whole life just because of a disturbing feeling in the body?

Sunday Quote: Getting out in Nature

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Perhaps the truth depends upon a walk around the lake.

Wallace Stevens

 

Living life more fiercely

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Yeats’ quote could almost be written about meditation.

I love the way he says we can life a “fiercer” life by touching into calm, or seeing what is truly important, by simplifying things down to the essential.

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.

W B Yeats

Reasons to be cheerful

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In this mild weather the first snowdrops are beginning to appear in the garden. I love the old legend about this flower. Adam and Eve were banished from the warmth and security of the Garden of Eden. They longed for the original sense of belonging and attunement which they once had. And then,  to make matters worse,  it became cold and started to snow. Eve began to cry, believing that she would never see  warmth and love again. Seeing this,  an angel felt sorry for her,   caught a snowflake in his hand, breathed on it, and when it hit the ground it turned into these delicate flowers. This beauty gave  her comfort and hope in the winter of her difficulties. Like Eve,  we all search for that original safety which we know deep down. We all need little signs to keep us going. We can look for them today.

Cheerfulness comes naturally with meditation. It is a quality of space created within the mind. When there’s space in the mind, the mind relaxes, and we feel a simple sense of delight. We experience the possibility of living a life in which we are not continuously aggravated by emotions, discursiveness, and concepts about the nature of things…. Despite all the ups and downs of our life, we are fundamentally awake individuals who have a natural ability to become compassionate and wise. Our nature is to be cheerful. This cheerfulness is deeper than temporary conditions. The day does not have to be sunny for us to be cheerful.

When we practice meditation, we are encouraging this natural state of cheerfulness. We don’t have to regard meditating as a somber activity; we can think of it as sitting there and being cheerful. We are using a technique to build clarity, strength, and flexibility of mind. In training our mind in pliability and power, we’re learning to relax, to loosen up, so that we can change our attitude on a dime. Strength of mind and pliancy are the causes and result of cheerfulness.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Seeing what really matters

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From time to time we get glimpses of what really matters in this life.  Maybe  when we spend some time in silence,  or in being with others, or by the beauty of nature such as seeing the swans in a walk along the Lake today as echoed in this poem. If we allow those experiences inside us  they let us see what makes life worth living, what brings us joy.  We connect deeply and are filled with a sense of gratitude which stays with us forever. And even when they fly away and are out of sight, the wonder which they awoke stays in the heart.

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river? Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air – An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

Mary Oliver, The Swan

Learning from loss in our lives

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A clear, cold night. Stars in the night sky. They are there, as they have been for people for millions of years, seemingly unchanging, but actually moving and evolving, just as we are.

Surviving a loss and letting go is only half of the story. The other half is the secret belief that we will find, in one form or another, what we have lost. And it is that potential, shimmery as a star on a clear night that helps us survive.

Veronica Chambers