impermanence – Page 419 – Mindfulbalance

No ground beneath our feet

March 10, 2011March 10, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

In Tibetan there is an interesting word: ye tang che. The ye part means “totally, completely,” and the rest of it means “exhausted.” Altogether, ye tang che means totally tired out. It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope. This is an important point. This is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope that there is somewhere better to be, that there is someone better to be, we will never relax with where are or who we are.

To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic. To seek for some lasting security is futile. To undo our very ancient and very stuck habitual patterns of mind requires that we begin to turn around some of our most basic assumptions. Believing in a solid, separate self, continuing to seek pleasure and avoid pain, thinking that someone “out there” is to blame for our pain : one has to get totally fed up with these ways of thinking. One has to give up hope that this way of thinking will bring us satisfaction. Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there is anywhere to hide.

Hopelessness means that we no longer have the spirit for holding our trip together. We may still want to hold our trip together. We long to have some reliable, comfortable ground under our feet, but we’ve tried a thousand ways to hide and a thousand ways to tie up all the loose ends, and ground just keeps moving under us. Trying to get lasting security teaches us a lot, because if we never try to do it, we never notice that it can’t be done. At every turn we realize once again that it’s completely hopeless – we can’t get any ground under our feet.

Pema Chodron

Creating space in our lives

March 9, 2011March 9, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of the season of Lent in the Christian Calendar. It begins a time of reflection, of creating more space in our lives. Traditionally this meant giving up some things to create more focus, dropping our own narrative for a while to have space for other concerns. A season like this leads us to reflect on the priorities in our lives and challenges us to have the confidence to stop, to be just with ourselves, and to be content with what is there. To notice that we often have a need to distract and reassure ourselves with our plans, our projects, our reminders that we are needed.

In Lent we are encouraged to simplify things. Like the times we are on retreat, when we keep an exterior silence in order to look at our interior chatter, we are asked to reflect on nurturing our inner lives, to see if we are living with direction and with a real purpose. We can get tired of always running in our lives, or the way that we can fill our time with distractions such as going online, TV and other forms of chatter. So even if we are not Christian we can find ways to create some space, to create some distance from our concerns, to be silent, or maybe to listen to others more than speaking. Silence has always been part of the world religions and wisdom traditions, as in the life of the Desert Fathers who simplified distractions in order to see what was really important.

To do this we need to get quite specific. Lent is a period of 40 days, so we can look on it as a challenge or an experiment. Try to set aside a period of quiet at the start of each day, for ten to twenty minutes. Maybe just sit in the early morning sun, or after some silence write down some thoughts in a journal. Consciously set aside a time of quiet before the activities of the day start and see what effect this has over the 40 days.

A man may seem to be silent, but if in his heart he is criticizing others, he is babbling ceaselessly. But there may be another who talks from morning till night and yet he is truly silent, because he says nothing that is not profitable.

The Desert Fathers, Abba Pimen

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.

Henri Nouwen

Happiness is already here…..

March 5, 2011March 5, 2011 Karl Duffy1 Comment

An interesting quote. Sometimes we look in all kinds of places for our happiness – a new relationship, a better car, a holiday, other people, a more prestigious job. However most research and practice shows that very little of happiness is due to changes in external circumstances, or getting the world to be as we think it should be. These things change all the time, and even when we think we have gotten the mix right, and feel we are in control, it is often a short-lived illusion. Rather, happiness is a skill, or a group of skills, that we can cultivate, based on a source of natural goodness already within us, with which we approach both good and bad in life as they arise and pass away before us. Looking for happiness creates a duality which is not always helpful. Always focusing outside of ourselves means that we do not often realize what we already have, and fail to live in this moment, as we work to change ourselves and our circumstances to “improve” them and ourselves.

I wish to draw attention to the following problem:

the idea of happiness presupposes that at present we are unhappy.

Kosho Uchiyama Roshi

What way it is ‘supposed’ to be?

March 3, 2011March 3, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The more things go “our way” for a while, the more we can believe that that is the way it is supposed to be. And when things don’t go “our way,” which sooner or later they will not, we can get angry, disappointed, depressed, devastated forgetting that it was never “supposed to be” any one way at all.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Arriving at your own Door

Time past and time future

March 2, 2011March 2, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Go, go, go, said the bird: Human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Another post on remaining in the present moment, this time as a practical way of working with fear. It is prompted by a nice comment I got from Eric regarding a previous post, where he quoted Einstein. That set me thinking of another quote from the same famous scientist, which echoes some of the ideas we find in our meditation practice: People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

When we meditate we come to see that – in one sense – the past and the future exist only in the mind. And often with regard to the future we create scenarios which will never happen, leading to worry. Last night in the MBSR Course, we had a discussion about how we can work when strong emotions, such as fear, arise. One thing we can do is to recognize that some of the thoughts connected to the fear concern future scenarios which may never happen. If we can let go of those thoughts – and that is not always easy – what have we got to work with when we just stay in the present? The main thing is the sensation in our body at this moment. We notice there is a tightness in the chest, a clenching or a knot in the stomach, or rushed breathing. So this is our practice: We recognize this, and stay with the present, experiencing fear or anxiety as it is actually happening, as an embodied feeling. We then try not to add any judgment about the feeling or about ourselves to the moment. We let go of trying to fix it. We practice just being with the sensation for as long as we can, seeing what is going on. Thich Nhat Hahn writes about this practice as a way of taking care of ourselves, almost like we would take care of a frightened child:

Mindfulness is there in order to recognize. To be mindful of something is to recognize that something is there in the present moment. Mindfulness is the capacity of being aware of what is going on in the present moment. “Breathing in, I know that fear has manifested in me; breathing out, I smile towards my fear.” This is not an act of suppression or of fighting. It is an act of recognizing. Once we recognize our fear, we embrace it with a lot of awareness, a lot of tenderness.