Tag: Meditation

Fitting in

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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A new home decoration show starts on the Irish television channel this evening. The popularity of shows like this at the moment – or ones which look at houses abroad or down the country – and which start when people are a bit down after the Summer holidays, can fuel the anxious, comparing mind.  Even how you decorate your home becomes a sign of how well you are doing, or another way to feel that you do not match up:

The need to be normal is the predominant anxiety disorder
in modern life.

Thomas Moore, Original Self

The myth of lives without challenges

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File:Rocky path on the Ben Nevis climb - geograph.org.uk - 856611.jpg

Pain is inevitable; lives come with pain. Suffering is not inevitable. If suffering is what happens when we struggle with our experience because of our inability to accept it, then suffering is an optional extra.

Sylvia Boorstein, It’s Easier than you Think

The common myth that is perpetuated in society is that the normal person is happy, balanced and integrated – otherwise there is something wrong with them; maybe they’re mentally unstable. We’re even alarmed by unhappy people. Everyone in the media is smiling and cheerful. The politicians are all smiling, cheerful. confident; funeral homes even make the corpses up to look smiling, cheerful and confident…… Unhappiness in Western culture is often treated as a sign of failure.

Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

photo Stephen Sweeeney

Breaking problems down

Karl Duffy1 Comment

evening sun kildare

Gentle, slow, walking – best done  in nature – sends a signal to the brain and by slowing down the body we slow down the rushing mind.  It can put things in perspective and prevent us from living all the time in our heads:

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
 But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
 hills and a cloud.

Wallace Stevens, Of the Surface of Things

Don’t rush past

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File:A Typical Sky.jpg

If you notice the wonderful smell of the rain, instead of just moving quickly past the experience without deeply appreciating it, you can prolong your contact with this wonderful sensation. Pause for a moment and really let yourself experience the smell of the rain. If you are struck by the blueness of the sky, linger for a moment and breathe mindfully, taking in the wonderful blue color. Don’t rush past these marvelous experiences, treating them as if they are unimportant. To treat them as unimportant is ultimately to treat yourself as unimportant. This is your life: enjoy it!

Thomas Bien

photo bryancalabro

Intimate Kindness

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Autumn_Forest_in_the_Sun

Kindness strikes a resonance with the depths of your own heart; it also suggests that your vulnerability, though somehow exposed, is not taken advantage of; rather, it has become an occasion for dignity and empathy. Kindness casts a different light, an evening light that has the depth of color and patience to illuminate what is complex and rich in difference. Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the instinct that at the deepest level of reality some intimate kindness holds sway. This is the heart of blessing. To believe in blessing is to believe that our being here, our very presence in the world, is itself the first gift, the primal blessing. As Rilke says: Hier zu sein ist so viel — to be here is immense. To be created and come to birth is to be blessed. Some primal kindness chose us and brought us through the forest of dreaming until we could emerge into the clearance of individuality, with a path of life opening before us through the world.

John O Donohue

Remembering to stop today

Karl Duffy5 Comments

File:A pause (2418455126).jpg

The first step we take in developing mental well-being, and employing mind training, is remembering that in every moment we can choose how to direct our inner life. Most of us live our lives in reactive mode – we respond to things as they happen without considering our response. We are on automatic pilot. Lacking a sense  of inner control, we typically respond by trying to control the world and others. So step one is simply setting the intention to be aware. It is remembering to stop so you give ourself a choice in how to react. It is remembering that we are in control of our emotional life….Our inner experience may be positive, it may be mundane, or it may be disturbing, but we are the only ones in control of it.

Karuna Cayton, The Misleading Mind