Tag: Meditation

A natural lightness of heart

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Meditation comes alive through a growing capacity to release our habitual entanglement in the stories and plans, conflicts and worries that make up the small sense of self, and to rest in awareness. In meditation we do this simply by acknowledging the moment-to-moment changing conditions—the pleasure and pain, the praise and blame, the litany of ideas and expectations that arise. Without identifying with them, we can rest in the awareness itself, beyond conditions, and experience what my teacher Ajahn Chah called jai pongsai, our natural lightness of heart.

Jack Kornfield, A Mind like Sky: Wise Attention, Open Awareness

 

What we think we know

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Instead of building bigger or fancier boxes, we need to develop the antidote to all our partial views of reality: being present with our experience as it is. This is unconditional presence. We could also call it beginner’s mind. As Suzuki Roshi put it, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.” We have all become experts at being ourselves, and in so doing we have lost our ability to be present with our experience in a fresh, open-minded way. Beginner’s mind is a willingness to meet whatever arises freshly, without holding to any fixed idea about what it means or how it should unfold.

John Welwood, Towards a Psychology of Awakening

Resting the mind

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Sometimes you may think that to sit is very difficult. But when you are able to stop and be at peace it is very easy…While sitting I make almost no use of my intellect. I don’t try to analyze things or solve complex problems by thinking about them. Thinking requires strenuous mental work and makes us tired. This is not the case while resting in awareness, or recognizing thoughts and emotions as they appear, or even taking the time to look deeply into them. We have a tendency to think that meditation demands a great mobilization of grey matter, but that’s not really the case.  Meditation is not hard labour.  Meditation rests the mind

Thich Nhat Hahn, Making Space: Creating a Home Meditation Practice

In meditation as in life

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So much of what is involved in meditation instruction is a matter of finding ways to keep it simple. Everyone knows how to breathe: anyone can feel the breath as it fills the chest and moves it in and out of the nose. It’s like climbing stairs. We all know how to take that first step; what is not so easy is taking one step after another after another, especially since in our practice the staircase is never-ending and we can’t be sure where it leads. Yet at each step, all we have to do is take the next step, the next breath.

Barry Magid, Ending the pursuit of Happiness

Dropping the habitual

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When the retreat center I co-founded, the Insight Meditation Society, first opened, someone created a mock brochure describing a retreat there, with …a wonderful made up motto for us: “It is better to do nothing than to waste your time.” I loved that motto, and thought it exemplified a lot about how meditation serves to help us unplug. Although that motto never made it into our official presentation, it actually was an accurate description of mindfulness meditation. Basically, we enter into mindfulness practice so that we can learn how to do nothing and not waste our time, because wasting our time is wasting our lives.

We come to meditation to learn how not to act out the habitual tendencies we generally live by, those actions that create suffering for ourselves and others, and get us into so much trouble. Doing nothing does not mean going to sleep, but it does mean resting –  resting the mind by being present to whatever is happening in the moment, without adding on the effort of attempting to control it. Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.

Sharon Salzberg, How Doing Nothing Can Help You Truly Live

Today, a new month, starting over…

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The danger in meditation practice is the habit of grasping at things, grasping at states; so the concept that’s most useful is the concept of letting go, rather than of attaining and achieving. If you say today that yesterday you had a really super meditation, absolutely fantastic, just what you’ve always dreamed of, and then today you try to get the same wonderful experience as yesterday, but you get more restless and more agitated than ever before – now why is that? Why can’t we get what we want? It’s because we’re trying to attain something that we remember; rather than really working with the way things are, as they happen to be now. So the correct way is one of mindfulness, of looking at the way it is now, rather than remembering yesterday and trying to get to that state again.

Ajahn Sumedho.