Tag: Meditation

Seeing how the mind adds on..

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Someone calls you an idiot….Then you start thinking “How can they call me an idiot? They’ve got no right to call me an idiot! How rude to call me an idiot!  I’ll get them back for calling me an idiot”  And you suddenly realise that you have let them call you an idiot another four  times. Every time you remember what they said, you allow them to call you an idiot once again. Therein lies the problem.

If someone calls you an idiot,  and you immediately let go, therein lies the solution.

Why allow other people control your inner happiness?

Ajahn Brahm, Who Ordered this Truckload of Dung?

A basic sense of groundlessness

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Some reflections on the basic human condition – similar to the idea of groundlessness in Pema Chodron this morning –  this time in a commentary on a phrase from Karl Rahner, one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the last century. Learning to sit with this is the basic work of meditation. Running away from it, or taking it to mean that something is wrong with us is at the root of most of our problems.

In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable,we eventually learn that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.  Karl Rahner

What does it mean to be tormented by “insufficiency of everything attainable?” How are we tortured by what we cannot have? We all experience this daily. In fact, for all but a few privileged, peaceful times, this torment is like an undertow to everything we experience; beauty makes us restless when it should bring us peace, the love we experience with our spouse does not fulfill our longings, the relationships we have within our families seem too petty and too domestic to be fulfilling, our job is hopelessly inadequate to the dreams we have for ourselves, the place we live in seems boring and lifeless in comparison to other places, and we are too restless to sit peacefully at our own tables, sleep peacefully in our own beds, and be at ease within our own skins. We are tormented by the insufficiency of everything attainable when our lives are too small for us and we live in them in such a way that we are always waiting, waiting for something or somebody to come along and change things so that our lives , as we imagine them, might begin. ….. To be tormented with restlessness is to be human.

Ron Rolheiser

Getting to know our fears well

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Finding the courage to go to the places that scare us cannot happen without compassionate inquiry into the workings of ego…… Flexibility and openness bring strength ……. running from groundlessness weakens us and brings pain. But do we understand that becoming familiar with the running away is the key? Openness doesn’t come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well.

Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times,

Learning from the less pleasant moments

Karl Duffy1 Comment

It is essential to learn to confront the less pleasant aspects of existence. Our job as meditators is to learn to be patient with ourselves, to see ourselves in an unbiased way, complete with all our sorrows and inadequacies. We have to learn to be kind to ourselves. In the long run avoiding unpleasantness is a very unkind thing to do to yourself. Paradoxically, kindness entails confronting unpleasantness when it arises. When you are having a bad time, examine that experience, observe it mindfully, study the phenomenon and learn its mechanics. The way out of a trap is to study the trap itself, and learn how it is built. You do this by taking the thing apart, piece by piece. The trap can’t trap you if it has been taken to pieces. The result is freedom.

Bhante Gunaratna, Mindfulness in Plain English

Lessons in every season

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Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

Mary Oliver, Starlings in Winter

The two aspects of meditation

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The answer to ‘Why meditate?’ is as obvious as ‘Why be happy?’ It’s based on a natural interest in one’s welfare. Most of us at some time or another look to get an overview of our lives, or of our mental/emotional states, in order to find either a direction forward or a stable place within ourselves. Meditation exercises help us to do just this, through the development of steady introspective attention, otherwise known as ‘mindfulness and clear comprehension’ . ‘Mindfulness’ is a steady attention to a particular experience, while ‘clear comprehension’ is the comprehension that can occur when this attention is steady. Clear comprehension fully attunes to the specific but changing character of a sensation, feeling, mood or thought. Taken together then, mindfulness and clear comprehension offer a way of maintaining a direct view of one’s inner life a moment at a time. It offers us a way to get to know ourselves directly and in-depth.

Ajahn Sucitto