Tag: mind

A helpful way of using the mind

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Holland countryside wide open plain.jpg

In the morning when you wake up, reflect on the day ahead and aspire to use it to keep a wide-open heart and mind. At the end of the day, before going to sleep, think over what you’ve done. If you fulfilled your aspiration, even once, rejoice in that. If you went against your aspiration, rejoice that you are able to see what you did and are no longer living in ignorance. This way you will be inspired to go forward with increasing clarity, confidence, and compassion.

 Pema Chödrön

photo: virtualage

Lost in our moods

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

 

File:Leaf on tree in Yosemite park.jpg

This mind of ours is naturally peaceful. It’s still and calm like a leaf that is not being blown about by the wind…

Why the mind doesn’t feel peaceful right now is because it gets lost in its own moods. There’s nothing to mind itself. It simply abides in its natural state, that’s all. That sometimes the mind feels peaceful and other times not peaceful is because it has been tricked by moods. The untrained mind lacks wisdom.  Moods come and trick it into feeling pleasure one minute and suffering the next. Happiness then sadness. But the natural state of a person’s mind isn’t one of happiness or sadness. This experience of happiness and sadness is not the actual mind itself, but just these moods which have tricked it. The mind gets lost, carried away by these moods with no idea what’s happening.  It still isn’t very clever. And we go on thinking that it’s our mind which is suffering or our mind which is happy, when actually it’s just lost in its various moods.

Ajahn Chah, Training this Mind

 

A different day

Karl Duffy8 Comments

dawn jura

If you’re determined to think of yourself as limited, fearful, vulnerable, or scarred by past experience,

know only that you have chosen to do so,

and that the opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living

A wider container

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Picture of the Year Winner

Awareness is not the same as thought.

It lies beyond thinking, although it makes no use of thinking, honoring its value and its power.

Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thought as thought rather than getting caught up in them as reality.

Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever You go, There you are

photo Wagner Machado Carlos Lemes

More stories

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Scenes from the 2004 Carnivale in Venice (IMG 4664a) (2763939559).jpg

Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening,

stories that get in the way of direct experience.

Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.

Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness, The Power of Meditation

photo frank kovalchek

The fear that stops us

Karl Duffy3 Comments
File:Trick Or Treat-boo.jpg
We are more often frightened than hurt;
and we suffer more from imagination than from reality
Seneca, Roman Stoic philosopher, 4 BC – 65 AD.
photo paul sapiano