Tag: mind

Cultivating mental skills

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Inner conflicts are often linked with excessive rumination on the past and anticipation of the future. You are not truly paying attention to the present moment, but are engrossed in your thoughts, going on and on in a vicious circle, feeding your ego and self-centeredness. This is the opposite of bare attention. To turn your attention inside means to look at pure awareness itself and dwell without distraction, yet effortlessly, in the present moment.

If you cultivate these mental skills, after a while you won’t need to apply contrived efforts anymore. You can deal with mental perturbations like the eagles I see from the window of my hermitage in the Himalayas deal with crows. The crows often attack them, diving at the eagles from above. But, instead of doing all kinds of acrobatics, the eagle simply retracts one wing at the last moment, lets the diving crow pass, and then extends its wing again. The whole thing requires minimal effort and causes little disturbance. Being experienced in dealing with the sudden arising of emotions in the mind works in a similar way.

Matthieu Ricard, This is your Brain on Bliss

Photo: Janis Ringuette

What happens when the train stops

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Maybe it’s like this for many people. A day rattles by full of this and that, like an old freight train. And at the end of it, it parks itself at no final destination still carrying the cargo. Sleep is an untidy mish-mash of dreams. To wake in the middle of the night, even with someone sleeping beside you, is to sense loss and uncertainty.  It may seem that that’s the way life has to go; that we have to be busy. However, it’s also the case that we choose to be. In order to jump over the gap that yawns open when the activity or the engagement stops, most people have an array of hobbies, gadgets or books. Even more tellingly, if these fillers aren’t available the mind fills with discordant thoughts and dissonant emotions. One of the worst ordinary things that happen for someone is to be left waiting somewhere without a friend, say at an airport, with nothing to do and no-one to talk to. Restlessness grabs hold; or loneliness, worries, and unresolved emotions. 
 
So thank goodness for meditation, which offers a way to steady and clear the mind. Meditation also gets us to recognize a fundamental property of consciousness: that although that mind-stream may carry all kinds of creatures and a lot of rubbish, its ‘water’ is clear. To be more prosaic – we can watch, or witness the movements and content of the mind. There is an awareness of the flow of mental content, from the sublime to the ridiculous, heavens and hells; and also a detachment from being that flow. In meditation, when you recognize this normal property – awareness – it feels like an important realization. Sometimes it’s seen as the only valid and necessary realization. We can be ‘that which knows.’
Ajahn Sucitto

Knowing the mind

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We already have what we need — the opportunity to weave the tapestry of happiness every day with the needle and thread of our own mind.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

See the world as a mirror. It is all a reflection of mind. When you know this, you can grow in every moment, and every experience reveals truth and brings understanding.

Ajahn Chah

The mind needs training too

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The Tibetan word for meditation is “gom”. It essentially means “getting used to, familiarizing”. Meditation, then, is the act of familiarizing your mind with what you want it to do. That process fo familiarity is just taking qualities and abilities that the mind naturally has, focusing on them in a methodical way, and thus building your base. The bones and tendons of the mind are mindfulness and awareness. Mindfulness is the mind’s strength and awareness is its flexibility. Without these abilities we cannot function. When we drink a glass of water, drive a car or have a conversation, we are using mindfulness and awareness. Unless we train it, the mind does the minimum necessary to fulfill a function. in that way it is like the body.…Without conditioning, even a sudden dash to keep our kids out of harm’s way – or to catch a plane or a bus – will tire us out.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Running with the mind of meditation. 

Becoming a silent watcher.

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Be present as the watcher of your mind  –  of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations.  Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react.  Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future.  Don’t judge or analyze what you observe.  Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction.  Don’t make a personal problem out of them.  You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.

Eckhart Tolle

Tea without leaves

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Sometimes people think that when they meditate there should be no thoughts and emotions at all; and when thoughts and emotions do arise, they become annoyed and exasperated with themselves and think that they have failed.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  There is a Tibetan saying: ‘It’s a tall order to ask for meat without bones, and tea without leaves.”  So long as you have a mind, there will be thoughts and emotions. 

Just as the ocean has waves, or the sun has rays, so the mind’s own radiance is its thoughts and emotions.  The ocean has waves, yet the ocean is not particularly disturbed by them.  The waves are the very nature of the ocean.   Waves will rise, but where do they go?  Back into the ocean.  And where do waves come from? The ocean.  In the same manner, thoughts and emotions are the radiance and expression of the very nature of the mind.  They rise from the mind, but where do they dissolve? Back into the mind.  Whatever arises, do not see it as a particular problem.  If you do not impulsively react, if you are only patient, it will once again settle into its essential nature. 

Sogdal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying