Tag: Meditation

Our inner drama department

Karl Duffy2 Comments

When we examine our thought stream with mindfulness, we encounter an inner sound track. As it plays, we can become the hero, the victim, the princess or the leper. There is a whole drama department in outr head, and the casting director is indiscriminately handing out the roles of inner dictators and judges, adventurers and prodigal sons, inner entitlement and inner impoverishment. Sitting in meditation we are forced to acknowledge them all. As Anne Lamott writes “My mind is like a bad neighbourhood: I try not to go there alone” . When we see how compulsively these thoughts repeat themselves, we begin to understand the psychological truth of “samsara”, the Sanskrit word for circular, repetitive existence. Samsara describes the unhealthy repetitions in our daily life.

Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart

Opening our eyes

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Life is no passing memory of what has been nor the remaining pages in a great book waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing speaking out loud in the clear air.

It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last, fallen in love with solid ground.

David Whyte

Trying not to hide

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Anyone who understands impermanence ceases to be contentious. The Dhammapada.

I sometimes remind students, “Try not to duck. Try to see the truth of your experience right now, Try to be there” When we are in contention with the moment, we push it away and then we don’t see it clearly. When we see things clearly we can usually figure them out. And when we see things cordially, or at least when we allow ourselves to see them this way, then they are not distorted by our liking or not liking. Another way of putting this is, “Let us see the truth of every moment and lets see it without contention”

Sylvia Boorstein, Greet this Moment as a Friend

Bare attention is difficult

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

As this morning’s quote reminds us, in meditation we practice giving bare attention to the breath, just noticing,  without adding anything. We try to extend this to life, slowing down the continual pre-judgments or commentary in our heads. However, it is not easy just to let things be, without the immediate adding of a word or evaluation. The mind quickly adds words, positive ones like, “This is good, I like it here”, or more likely spontaneous negative ones, such as ” This is not for me, This is boring” or “She always says the same things”. Fixed ideas mean that we lose curiosity about what is unfolding each day. So our practice includes getting the balance between knowing and not-knowing, trying to know fully what is actually happening and losing some of our stories about people or about how our life is going. 

[In the beginning,] … the photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer — a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same things, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world.

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Not always putting labels on our experience

Karl Duffy2 Comments

The disciples were absorbed in a discussion of Lao-tzu’s dictum:
“Those who know, do not say;
Those who say, do not know.”
When the master entered,
they asked him what the words meant.
Said the master, “Which of you knows the fragrance of a rose?”
All of them indicated that they knew.
Then he said, “Put it into words.”
All of them were silent.

 Anthony DeMello, One Minute Wisdom

How to be in control of our lives

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Basic goodness, the shimmering brilliance of our being, is as clear as a mountain lake. But we’re not certain about our own goodness. We begin to stray from it as soon as we wake up in the morning, because our mind is unstable and bewildered. Our thoughts drag us around by a ring in our nose, as if we were cows in the Indian market. This is how we lose control of our lives. We don’t understand that the origin of happiness is right here in our mind. We might experience happiness at times, but we’re not sure how we got it, how to get it again, or how long it’s going to last when it comes. We live life in an anxious, haphazard state, always looking for happiness to arrive.

 When we are confused about the source of happiness, we start to blame the world for our dissatisfaction, expecting it to make us happy. Then we act in ways that bring more confusion and chaos into our life. When our mind is busy and discursive, thinking uncontrollably, we are engaging in a bad habit. We are stirring up the mud of jealousy, anger, and pride. Then the mind has no choice but to become familiar with the language of negativity and develop it further.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche