Tag: mind

Being watchful of who comes in

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Our mind is like a house, and our mindfulness is like the tenant of that house. Because we don’t want any intruders or unwelcome guests, we lock all the doors and windows of our house. Now no one can get in unless we let them in. No one can enter unannounced. That’s the function of mindfulness—to be watchful of what’s trying to enter our mind.

If an angry thought tries to enter our mind, it can’t come in until we open the door. Our purpose is not to shut everything out; it’s to remain conscious of our environment and what’s happening in it. Then we can deal with it appropriately. We can open the door to our angry thought, listen to it, and then ask it to leave. We recognize it as a thought and don’t mistake it for who we are. That’s the point. It shifts the experience. Instead of thinking, “I’m really angry right now,” we think, “Oh, look, an angry thought has entered my mind.” It’s easy to let go of a thought that’s a guest in your mind; it’s harder when you take on the identity of the guest.

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Rebel Buddha

Watching the leaves float by

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Our thoughts are always happening. Much like leaves floating down a stream…If you are standing by a river and a leaf floats by, you have your choice of following the leaf with your eye or keeping your attention fixed in front of you. The leaf floats out of your line of vision. Another leaf enters…and floats by. But as we stand on the bank of the river and the leaves float by, there is no confusion as to whether or not we are the leaves. Similarly, it turns out that there is a place in our minds from which we can watch our own mental images go by. We aren’t our thoughts any more than we are the leaves.

Ram Dass and Paul Gorman

The breath as anchor

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Traditionally in mindfulness meditation you use your breath initially as the object of concentration to collect and unify the mind. You typically stay with the experience of the breath as it touches the body in a single spot, such as the tip of the nose or the rise and fall of the chest, or the feeling of the breath in the whole body. When your mind starts wandering, the breath becomes your anchor to which you return in order to stabilize and focus your attention.

Phillip Moffitt

Not getting stuck in the past

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Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on ….. their children than the unlived life of the parent. Carl Jung

I had a conversation today which made me reflect on the way that parental patterns have a huge influence on us even as adults. This notion has been around for a long time. In the Old Testament it was believed that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children. This was at times interpreted somewhat simplistically as a a way of explaining inherited illnesses or chance misfortune. However, in another sense it seems to accord with what can be found in modern psychology.

Some of the behaviours which we see in adult life are in response to unconscious traces left by experiences had in childhood. In general these experiences we have when little  frame us into certain judgements about the world. We come to see it as either predictable, stable and nurturing or uncertain and precarious. Our parents also had their own emotional and relationship patterns and ways of dealing with anxiety, and frequently played these out in their relationship to each other, impacting upon us as children. From this we drew our conclusions as to how to deal with the world, and how to develop our own relationships. This parental wound – or the places where our parents got stuck – has a huge influence on our own inner life. The inner world we form as a child will replicate what we see in the outer world and then as an adult we can gravitate towards situations that replicate this inner world dynamic.

We tend to do this by repeating the pattern or by being determined to do the opposite. However, because the opposite behaviour is undertaken in response to the parents’ way of behaving, we are still defining ourselves by it and end up strengthening the dynamic rather than weakening it. A lot of adult neurosis or anxiety can be understood as a part of the self looking to discover its full development away from the narrow confines of the family of origin. A repeating way of doing things or a rigid personal style is a clue to the original place of lack or neglect. Our minds love habits, even when they hurt us.

It is a slow work to recognize the limited nature of the early strategies which we have incorporated into our personality and begin the work of healing by no longer acting on them.

Telling the truth of our soul to ourselves is the first task. Living that truth is the second task. And telling it to other is the third. Such truth-telling will be the supreme test of our lives.

James Hollis

The use of meditation in medicine

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Some kind of meditative practice is found in all the world’s wisdom traditions, and has been around for thousands of years, says Shauna Shapiro of Santa Clara University, co-author with Linda Carlson of the book The Art and Science of Mindfulness. Most include focusing attention and letting thoughts and emotions go by without judgment or becoming involved.

However, it is striking to note how in recent years meditation is progressively going mainstream, and is now the subject of research in scientific journals. A U.S. government survey in 2007 found that about 1 out of 11 Americans, more than 20 million, has meditated in the previous year. And a growing number of medical centers are teaching meditation to patients for stress and pain relief, as  conventional medicine increasingly embraces healing methods once dismissed as “alternative medicine” and combining them with standard treatment. Jon Kabat-Zinn credits the “colossal shift in acceptance” of meditation to accelerating research on the benefits of meditation.

His enthusiasm is shared by practictioners on the ground, like Dr. Barrie R. Casselith, from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s Integrative Medicine Service in New York: ”It’s not invasive, it has no side effects, it has tremendous benefits that are very well documented and it’s something patients can do on their own so it doesn’t cost anything. It’s not a cancer treatment….but… ‘it deals with quality of life and helps with symptoms. It can relieve pain, lower blood pressure and heart rate. It can make people feel calmer, it enhances mood. It does lots of good things.”

www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-06-07-meditate_N.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/23/health/a-therapy-gains-ground-in-hospitals-meditation.html

How to improve our wellbeing

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We expend a lot of effort to improve the external conditions of our lives, but in the end it is always the mind that creates our experience of the world and translates this experience into either well-being or suffering

Matthieu Ricard