Tag: Meditation

Lives as a to-do list

Karl Duffy2 Comments
Better is one handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and grasping after the wind. Ecclesiastes 4:6

Often our lives become so driven that we are moving through our moments to get to better ones at some later point. We live to check things off our to-do list, then fall into bed exhausted at the end of the day, only to jump up the next morning to get on the treadmill once again. This way of living, if we can call it living, is compounded by all the ways in which our lives are now driven by the ever-quickening expectations we place on ourselves and that others place on us and we on them, generated in large measure by our increasing dependence on ubiquitous digital technology and its ever-accelerating effects on our pace of life. If we are not careful, it is all too easy to fall into becoming more of a human doing than a human being, and forget who is doing all the doing, and why. 

Jon Kabat Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners

A way of working with emotions when we feel flooded

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As I referred to recently, I was in the UK last week on a retreat directed by Ajahn Sucitto. So I quote him here, partly in reference to the very unseasonal weather they are having there, with communities struggling with severe flooding. Like most weather conditions, flooding can help us in our reflection on the mind, on how to work with  things that we cannot control, or things in our life change without us expecting them.

Mindfulness, the ability to bear witness is a tremendously powerful and skilful factor of mind. The Buddha called mindfulness the floodstopper. It stops the floods of greed, hatred and delusion. With mindfulness we give ourselves a choice with regard to following what arises in the mind; and keeping that choice available is something you want to go on doing because the mind almost longs to get trapped – and there are plenty of sights, sounds, flavours and ideas that can sweet you away out of aware responsibility. As we carry our body with us all the time, we can use that as a base for mindfulness; a place where we can stop the floods. We can turn our attention to the body and just refer to the body in the body, as it is – that is as sensations, energies and form, rather than the impressions of beauty or ugliness that identification imposes upon it.

Ajahn Sucitto, Seeing the Way.

What defines us

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Our dreams reveal to us the basic truth of life: years are biological, the spirit is eternal. The number of our years does not define us. There is in the human being a life force that never dies. It is the life force that proves to us that age does not fossilize us. Down deep, where our souls live, we stay forever young. It is this surging, driving force that brings us to the bar of life every day of our lives, whatever our age, however much we have been through, prepared to live life to the hilt again. It is only the cold, clear light of dawn that damps it, the fear in ourselves that th years have taken us beyond the right to be active. It is our own fault is we refuse to think again all the great ideas of our life – and our own position on each of them.

Joan Chittister, The Gift of Years

Appreciation, today

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Have you ever noticed how much emphasis some people place on even the smallest amount of difficulty in their lives, and how little time they spend reflecting on moments of happiness? Part of the reason for this is the idea that happiness is somehow rightfully ours, and that everything else is therefore wrong or out of place.

The idea of taking time out to be grateful may sound a little trite to some, but it’s essential if we want to get some more headspace. It’s very difficult to be caught up in lots of distracting thoughts when there is a strong sense of appreciation in your life. And by developing a more heartfelt appreciation of what we have, we also begin to see more clearly what’s missing in the lives of others.

Andy Puddicombe, Ten Tips for Living more Mindfully

Fearlessness

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When we slow down, when we relax with our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle. Sadness hits you in your heart, and your body produces a tear. Before you cry there is a feeling in your chest and then, after that, you produce tears in your eyes. You are about to produce rain or  waterfall in your eyes and you feel sad and lonely and perhaps romantic all at the same time. This is the first tip of fearlessness, and the first sign of real warriorship. You might think that, when you experience fearlessness, you will hear the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or see a great explosion in the sky, but it doesn’t happen that way. Discovering fearlessness comes from working with the softness of the human heart.

Elizabeth Lesser

Changing our relationship to our expectations

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We can learn to recognize that the difficulty is our path instead of trying to escape from it. This is a radical yet necessary change in our perspective. When uncomfortable things happen to us, we rarely want to have anything to do with them. We might respond with the belief ‘Things shouldn’t be this way’ or ‘Life shouldn’t be so messy.’ Who says? Who says that life shouldn’t be a mess? When life is not fitting our expectations of how it’s supposed to be, we usually try to change it to fit our expectations. But the key to practice is not to try to change our life but to change our relationship to our expectations — to learn to see whatever is happening as our path.

Ezra Bayda