Tag: Joy

Noticing, right now, this morning

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Normally,  fantasies are spinning out , one after another, usually about being someplace else or being different from what we are right now. What about a moment of stopping  and checking whether this is going on right now?  Simply waking up this moment to what is taking place right now, opening up to……nothing special. Just wind blowing, windows rattling, birds calling, breath flowing in and out, bright sunlight flowing through the shades making patterns on the floor. When that happens it is clear that no wishing has brought it about! Being here and now in unadorned simplicity is our true state – whole and inseparable from anything else.

Toni Parker, The Silent Question

Accepting our emptiness

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Following on from yesterday’s post, and applying it to our notions of psychological growth and maturity. Just as in nature, we need to be able to tolerate – and stop fighting with – the complexity,  disruptions, reversals and emptiness which are part of the normal human condition, and stop seeing them as unusual or as enemies to growth. In this way we move away from trying to get rid of them,  to accepting and authenticating them.

In our zeal to eliminate the ghosts of our childhood, to nourish the empty places of emotional insufficiency and to achieve the pinnacle of psychological development…we were treating feelings of emptiness as something that needed to be fixed and cured, and therefore losing the ground upon which we rest. Our aversion to emptiness is such that we have become experts at explaining it away, distancing ourselves from it, or assigning blame for its existence on the past or on the faults of others. We contaminate it with our personal histories and expect that it will disappear when we have resolved our personal problems. Thus. Western psychologists are trained to understand a report of emptiness as indicative of a deficiency in someone’s emotional upbringing, a defect in character, a defense against overwhelming feelings of aggression, or as a stand-in for feelings of inadequacy. Since most of us share one or more of these traits, it becomes easy to pathologize a feeling that in Buddhism serves as a starting point for self-exploration.

Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart

Knowing you have enough

Karl Duffy6 Comments

The Irish phrase Go leor can be translated in different ways in English, including the words “enough” and “plenty”. Today’s world is good at promoting and accumulating plenty. The message that we get in so many ways is that if you get more you will get happier. However, for a lot of people, this sense of “more” just seems to increase and expand – more expectations in work, more information coming at us, more decisions to make, more demands on our time. And this emphasis on plenty sometimes distracts us from where our real focus should be – on coming to see when we have enough. Thus we can find that we are less skilled at knowing when to let go and be satisfied with what we have, or how much we do.  Reflecting on replacing the word “plenty” with “enough”  can help us here. Deciding what is enough – and learning to be content with that –  is one of the most important pieces of work that we can do.

There is no greater offence than harbouring desires.

There is no greater disaster than discontent.

There is no greater misfortune than wanting more. 

Hence, if you are content you will always have enough.

Lao Tsu

Discovering the world anew

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Some more words from Jacques Lusseyran, who as I said in an earlier post, was blinded in an accident at age eight. He writes about the way this allowed him to develop his capacity for paying attention which goes far beyond just the ability to see and think :

[Those who can see] commit a strange error. They believe that we know the world only through our eyes. For my part, I discovered that the universe consists of pressure, that every object and every living being reveals itself to us at first by a kind of quiet yet unmistakable pressure that indicates its intention and its form. I even experienced the following wonderful fact: A voice, the voice of a person, permits him to appear in a picture. When the voice of a man reaches me, I immediately perceive his figure, his rhythm, and most of his intentions. Even stones are capable of weighing on us from a distance. So are the outlines of distant mountains, and the sudden depression of a lake at the bottom of a valley.

This correspondence is so exact that when I walked arm in arm with a friend along the paths of the Alps, I knew the landscape and could sometimes describe it with surprising clarity. Sometimes; yes, only sometimes. I could do it when I summoned all my attention. Permit me to say without reservation that if all people were attentive, if they would undertake to be attentive every moment of their lives, they would discover the world anew. They would suddenly see that the world is entirely different from what they had believed it to be.

Starting over and over again

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As I said in this morning’s post, mindfulness practice renews itself every day, as we start over again and again, returning to the present moment which is always different, always new. This is because life is continually changing, and what we are presented with today is not the same as yesterday, no matter what our thoughts tell us. So the underlying attitude is key: a gentle, non-judging, attitude towards ourselves and our efforts.

I first heard the phrase “just start over”  some 20 years ago from the meditation teacher Sharon Salzburg….who told us about her own struggle with learning to meditate – how she would become lost, distracted, and discouraged and would constantly second-guess herself and her teachers. Gradually she learned to pay no attention to the mental and emotional chatter and to just start over by meditating on her breath as she had been instructed. “Just start over” became her mantra, which she now teaches to her students.

Each time Salzburg repeated this phrase, I was deeply inspired. I realized that she was pointing to a radical attitudinal shift in which you cease to be reactive when you are knocked off your intended path. Instead, when you discover that you have lost your focus, you just begin again without getting caught up in emotional stories about why you can’t achieve your aim or judgments about how unworthy you are or why the change you seek is impossible.

As you know if you’ve ever tried to meditate, the mind is constantly being pulled away from its object of concentration by bodily sensations and mental activity, causing you to lose awareness of the present moment. In this same way, when strong feelings arise during your daily life, you get swept up in the story they create. You lose the awareness that enables you respond skillfully to events and that gives you peace of mind in the face of difficulty….. You have the mistaken notion that you must know why you have a problem and must get rid of it before you can act in a more self-empowering manner. Starting-over practice takes a different approach. It switches your focus away from dwelling on those characteristics that limit you and redirects it toward recognizing your strengths from which you can realize your potential…. In so doing, you free yourself from your judging mind that thinks it can control results and creates the grandiose expectation that you can do more than you can do in the present moment. You become a more effective person by simply learning to use your time and energy to do what you can do right now.

Phillip Moffitt, Starting Over

Not chasing after happiness

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Some more reflections on not going anywhere, from a lovely recent book by Thomas Bien, entitled The Buddha’s Way of Happiness. Letting go of our instinctive need to “fix” ourselves – of the drive to do more and more –  is the key to change.  Staying put is a secret to getting places.

We get stuck in the drama of our lives. If we are to find happiness we instinctively feel that we have to go through something, endure some difficulty, go on a quest, slay dragons or monsters and ultimately find the gold or the princess in order to find the resolution and the peace which we seek. When we are told that happiness is available right now, we can hardly escape thinking what we have to do, endure and struggle to find it. We almost can’t help it.

Seeing life as “story” gets us caught in the notion that we don’t have happiness. We have to go after happiness somehow.…When we learn that we can be happy right now, just breathing in and out, and seeing a leaf for the miracle it actually is, instead of the idea of “leaf”, we’re almost disappointed. We want it to be a great achievement. If we can’t find a way to see it as an achievement, then we can’t feel special and feed the ego. Instead, in seeing things as they actually are, we step outside the ego.