Tag: Meditation

Blocked and moving forward

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Fallen tree over the Beaulieu River, New Forest - geograph.org.uk - 179496.jpg

The river flows rapidly down the mountain, and then all of a sudden it gets blocked with big boulders and a lot of trees. The water can’t go any farther, even though it has tremendous force and forward energy. It just gets blocked there. That’s what happens with us, too; we get blocked like that. Letting go at the end of the out-breath, letting the thoughts go, is like moving one of those boulders away so that the water can keep flowing, so that our energy and our life force can keep evolving and going forward. We don’t, out of fear of the unknown, have to put up these blocks, these dams, that basically say no to life and to feeling life.

Pema Chodron

photo jim champion

Interpreting

Karl Duffy2 Comments

jigsaw_pieces

We all have a tendency to rush to interpretation in our lives, and that can present a challenge to being mindful of our experience. Instead of staying mindful of whatever is happening in the moment, we immediately begin to interpret our experience and create a story based on past associations and attitudes we have about ourselves and others. However, our interpretation is only our view of our experience; it isn’t the actual experience. As soon as we start to interpret an experience, we’re no longer having the experience, we’re having an experience of our interpretation: therefore, we miss the real experience.

 Phillip Moffit, Maintaining Mindfulness in Daily life

Connecting

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bridge-small

The nature of mindfulness is that it is never overcome by whatever is the present object of awareness. If we are mindful of a twisted or distorted state of mind, the mindfulness is not twisted or distorted. Even the most painful state of mind or the most difficult feeling in the body does not ruin mindfulness. A true opening, born of mindfulness, is marked by spaciousness and grace.

In our culture we are taught to push away, to avoid our feelings. This kind of aversion is the action of a mind caught in separation. Whether in the active, fiery form of anger and rage, or in a more inward, frozen form like fear, the primary function of these mental states is to separate us from what we are experiencing. But the only way that we can be free from suffering ourselves and avoid doing harm to others is by connection – a connection to our own pain and, through awareness and compassion, a connection to the pain of others.

Sharon Salzberg

The fixing mind

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Should I stay or should I go.jpg

We need to question our concepts about how we want things to be and what we want people to become. If we can let go of some of that, we can see more clearly what we can and cannot do. We can learn not to obsess about all the problems we cannot solve, but to sort through them to find the one or two things we can actually do that might be helpful. It is better to do one small helpful thing than punish yourself for the many things beyond your power and ability to change or affect. Some problems can be solved, some cannot, and some are best left unsolved.

Judy Lief, The problem with problems

photo olgierd rudak

Just doing nothing

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bird flying33

What we are talking about is very practical. Mindfulness practice is simple and completely feasible. And because we are working with the mind that experiences life directly, just by sitting and doing nothing, we are doing a tremendous amount.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Being at home in our deepest self

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stupa

At times in life we can have a sense of just wandering on, feeling a bit lost, when the moments we find ourselves in don’t seem to quite fit with what we were hoping for. At other times we find ourselves at home, when a spacious sense of acceptance becomes the more constant abiding. This can happen whether we are in Ireland or Geneva, at work or on pilgrimage, when the mind gets in contact with its own essential goodness and we switch off the need to be elsewhere. We realize that we are not really going anywhere, but not really staying anywhere either.

Meditation is …. not about getting somewhere else, 

but about allowing yourself to be where you already are.

Jon Kabat Zinn,  Wherever you go, there you are

photo of Ruwanweliseya Stupa, Anuradhapura, by dear friends Patrick and Bow on pilgrimage in Sri Lanka