Breath is the bridge that connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold again.
In our community, where people are practicing the mindfulness of doing laundry, washing dishes, eating, walking and so forth, everybody learns to use breath as a tool for restoring mindfulness.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Each of us is like a mosaic, with lots of lovely tiles, some that are basically neutral, and a few that could use a little – ah – work. It’s important to see the whole mosaic. But because of the brains negativity bias, we tend to fixate on what’s wrong with ourselves instead of what’s right. If you do twenty things in a day and nineteen go fine, what’s the one you think about? Probably the one that didn’t go so well.
Your brain builds new structures based on what you pay attention to. Focusing on the “bad” tiles in the mosaic that is you keeps feeding an underlying sense of being mediocre, flawed or less than others. And it blocks the development of the confidence and self-worth that comes from recognizing the good tiles. These results of the negativity bias are not fair. But they’re a big reason why most of us have feelings of inadequacy or self-doubt.
Rick Hanson, Just One Thing
Whenever the disempowering lens of history falls over our eyes, the present reality is subverted to the dynamics of the past, and one remains a prisoner….once again. Learning to find ones own truth, hold to it, and negotiate with others seems easy enough on paper. In practice, it means catching reflexive patterns while they occur, suffering the anxiety caused by living more consciously, and tolerating the assault of anxiety-driven “guilt” afterwards. (This guilt is not genuine; it is a form of anxiety aroused by the anticipated negative reaction of the other person). Such reactions for the child were enormously distressing and are still debilitating for the adult. Over the years we tend to believe that this old familiar system is who we really are, and, by and large, such a system so frequently presented to the world becomes how the world sees us, Being nice has, however, ceased being nice.
James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
As a new MBSR group started last night in Geneva, I will post for the next week some texts to support anyone just starting to practice strengthening their awareness and focusing the mind, a kind of basic foundation for mindfulness. For regular readers of the blog, they will be familiar quotes by now. However, as I have said before, practice is essentially the same for everyone – starting over and over again, re-minding ourselves to be present to our lives, as the mind wanders. We are all learning and starting over each day, as we again and again find ourselves far away from the “now”:
There is no other time than now. We are not, contrary to what we think, “going” anywhere. It will never be more rich in some other moment than in this one. Although we may imagine that some future moment will be more pleasant, or less, than this one, we can’t really know. But whatever the future brings, it will not be what you expect, or what you think, and when it comes, it will be now too. It too will be a moment that can be very easily missed, just as easily missed as this one.
Jon Kabat Zinn
My favorite picture is earthrise as seen from the moon. It’s perfect. A great blue and green ball floating in vast black space, hanging right there in its orbit. From that vantage point, the scene on earth is awesome. creatures being born, other ones dying; plants blooming on one side, plants withering on the other; snow snowing, winds blowing, volcanoes erupting, earthquakes shivering, people talking, music playing. From the moonview, its incredible cosmic drama. From our usual view, inside the drama, looking up at the moon, it’s a different story. It changes from the drama to my drama and gets to be a problem. If you’re far enough away, it’s not your story – its one of the six and a half billion stories.
Sylvia Boorstein: It’s Easier than you Think
The combination of stillness and movement is a spiritually effective style for how we live our lives. We refuse to be caught up in activity but are committed to frequent pausing, taking time to let things unfold. [This] combination of opposites characterizes us when we find psychological health and enter the spiritual realm, the twin goals of our evolution towards wholeness. We combine our psychological work, which takes effort, with our spiritual work, which takes allowing. The ego-Higher Self axis that happens in such individuation is visible in the combination of action and acceptance. A statue is motionless, but movement bursts forth, not only in the how the sculptor’s imagination brings it to life, but in the mysterious sense of motion he has achieved. This may be what he poet Rilke meant by “outer standstill and inner movement”
David Richo, Being True to Life
