Tag: Life

Stopping the spinning

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

One way to cultivate relaxation is through the practice of meditation. The practice of meditation has two elements: simplicity or peacefulness and insight, or clarity. The application of mindfulness allows us stop the world from spinning, by stopping the spinning of our own minds. This is the essence of the simplicity or peacefulness of shamatha. Then we can see the confusion. We can shine the light of vipassana,  or clear seeing, on confusion, and that brings the clarity of seeing things as they are. When we begin to see the situation as it is, and when we begin to see our own minds clearly, we diffuse the panic. From this experience we have in meditation, we may begin to see how we can relax on the spot in the midst of the most difficult experiences in our lives.

Carolyn Rose Gimian, Smile at Fear.

……and developing spaciousness.

Karl Duffy2 Comments

So let’s go back to our experience-body,  focus on it, and let things happen within that focus,  without pushing or trying to find anything, or come to a conclusion. In that context, when we come out of wanting something to happen, there’s some spaciousness – and when a feeling comes up, try to attune to that spaciousness. Develop an attitude and energy of not-feeding, demanding, pushing away, skipping off or proliferating around the feeling. This is non-attachment. By practicing in this way, we realize that for these few moments we don’t have to solve the problem of existence, or know who we are, or what we’re going to do. By being with something that we can directly attend to, not through inference or report, we can find an interesting point of nondependence.

Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

…and create room for joy

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We create room for joy as we move beyond “shoulds” and “musts” to an expansive state where we accept our capacity to be both powerful and gentle, expansive and reclusive, delighted and bored, wise and confused, passive and assertive, giving and receptive, generous and withholding, frightened and adventuresome, angry and loving. As we become accepting of ourselves we are more able to reach inside and speak our truths: Yes, No, I want, I can, I feel, I believe, I see, I love. This is a form of self-love that creates unity and peacefulness within because we are living at one with our wisest self.

Charlotte Kasl, Finding Joy

This Sunday, stop, be aimless…..

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Does the rose have to do something? No, the purpose of a rose is to be a rose. Your purpose is to be yourself. You don’t have to run anywhere to become someone else. You are wonderful just the way you are. We already have everything we are looking for, everything we want to become. Just be. Just being in the moment in this place is the deepest practice of meditation. The Heart Sutra says that there is “nothing to attain.”  We don’t need to search anywhere. We don’t need to practice to obtain some high position. We can enjoy every moment. People talk about entering nirvana, but we are already there. We have everything we need to make the present moment the happiest in our life, even if we have a cold or a headache. We don’t have to wait until we get over our cold to be happy. Having a cold is part of life. I am happy in the present moment. I do not ask for anything else. I do not expect any additional happiness. Aimlessness is stopping and realizing the happiness that is already available.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Quietening the mind

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Inside me a hundred beings are putting their fingers to their lips and saying,

“That’s enough for now.  Shhhhh.”

Silence is an ocean.   Speech is a river.

When the ocean is searching for you, don’t walk

to the language-river.

Listen to the ocean,

and bring your talky business to an end.

Rumi, Send the Chaperones Away

Stop fixing and choosing and doing and making….

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The engine that makes this go is taking a step back and trusting the body, trusting the breath, trusting the heart. We’re living our lives madly trying to hold onto everything, and it looks like it might work for awhile but in the end it always fails, and it never was working, and the way to be happy, the way to be loving, the way to be free is to really be willing to let go of everything on every occasion or at least to make that effort. So the practice really works with sitting down, returning awareness to the body, returning awareness to the breath. It usually involves sitting up straight and opening up the body and lifting the body so that the breath can be unrestrained. And then returning the mind to the present moment of being alive, which is anchored in the breath, in the body.

Then, of course, other things happen. You have thoughts, you have feelings. You might have a pain, an ache, visions, memories, reflections. All these things arise, but instead of applying yourself to them and getting entangled in them, you just bear witness to it, let it go, come back to the breathing and the body, and what happens is you release a whole lot of stuff in yourself. A whole new process comes into being that would not have been there if you were always fixing and choosing and doing and making. This way you’re allowing something to take place within your heart.

Norman Fischer