Tag: inspiration

Developing your Meditation Practice, Stage 1 continued

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The first of these posts talked about placement – we consciously place our awareness on the breath, intentionally moving away from whatever activity we were doing before.  At the same time, just as we sit down to practice, we simultaneously form our intention. One Zen teacher once gave a conference speech in which he summed up the whole of meditation in two words – “intention” and “attention”. S o the first stage in meditation involves forming an intention, right at the start,  the moment one sits. Our intention should be something like, I will use this period to consciously observe the mind and get to know it better. In a sense, we set a gentle model for our activity over the next twenty or thirty minutes.

Why is this so important? Because if we rush into sitting without consciously being aware of changing our activity and forming our intention we can find the mind wandering very quickly. After a minute or two we find ourselves in the same daydreaming we were involved in for much of the day or continuing the activity we have just finished. We may very quickly fall into the activity of checking how we are doing in this meditation and comparing it to yesterday’s or to a model of meditation which we have in our heads.

So the first stage in meditation is focused on how we sit. It seems obvious but is of vital importance. If we start well there is a greater chance that our whole sitting will go well. In the next post we will look at stage two, how to work with thoughts.

Balance 1: Make time

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The question in an age of rapid transit and conference calls and triple shift work days is balance. And the answer is balance too.

But what is balance in a society whose skewing of time has it totally off-balance? What is balance in a culture that has destroyed the night with perpetual light and keeps equipment going twenty-four hours a day because it is more costly to turn machines on and of than it is to pay people to run them at strange and difficult hours? In the first place balance for us is obviously not a mathematical division of the day. For most of us our days simply do not divide that easily. In the second place, balance for us is clearly not equivalence. Because I have done forty hours of work this week does nt mean that I will have forty hours of prayer and leisure. What it does mean, however, is that somehow I must make time for both. I must make time or die inside.

Joan Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

Balance 3: Make time and space for questions

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

When I was a child in New York City in the 1940s there were laws that attempted to legislate the Biblical injunction, “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” Businesses were closed. Shopping stopped. There were no convenience stores. People needed to remember, in advance of the Sabbath, to provide for the upcoming day of rest and spiritual reflection so that, on that day, they could rest. The community collectively caught its breath. Family members spent time with each other. They renewed connections. They visited neighbors.

I like to imagine that, whether or not people went to religious services, there was the possibility in that period of a pause for reflection. “What am I doing with my life?” “Is what I am doing good for me?” “Is it good for other people?” “Does my life make a difference in the world?” “Could my life make more of a difference in the world?”

All of the important fundamental questions in life seem to be waiting, so to speak, next on line at the top of the mind’s agenda, if only we give them the time and the space to present themselves.

Sylvia Boorstein