Tag: Mindfulness

Why do we practice?

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Good practice is about fear. Fear takes the form of constantly thinking, speculating, analyzing, fantasizing. With all that activity we create a cloud to keep ourselves safe in make-believe practice. True practice is not safe; it’s anything but safe. But we don’t like that, so we obsess with our feverish efforts to achieve our version of the personal dream. Such obsessive practice is itself just another cloud between ourselves and reality. The only thing that matters is seeing with an impersonal spotlight: seeing things as they really are. When the personal barrier drops away, why do we have to call it anything? We just live our lives.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Teens Day 7 : Health is related to paying attention

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The dynamic balance we call heath

involves both body and mind

and can be enhanced by specific qualities of attention

Jon Kabat Zinn


You don’t need much today

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We have to cultivate contentment with what we have. We really don’t need much. When you know this, the mind settles down. Cultivate generosity. Delight in giving. Learn to live lightly. In this way, we can begin to transform what is negative into what is positive. This is how we start to grow up.

Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, No Excuses

An underlying reality

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It is good to examine the reasons why we find fault with others or gossip or blame them for things that have happened. Often we will see, if we look deeply enough, that these behaviours are rooted in fear. Fear and anxiety evolved to keep us from physical danger. Our brains use the same mechanisms when it comes to emotional danger also, and depending on the upbringing we have, we can find that we expend a lot of energy each day dealing with fear. This underlying fear is not easy to work with; however, acknowledging it and becoming aware of our instinct to run away  or cover it up with distractions, relationships and busyness,  is a necessary starting point. We practice looking at what scares us and opening to all that life offers. We develop a greater compassion towards ourselves and our confidence can grow.

If we are honest with ourselves,

most of us will have to admit that we live out our lives in an ocean of fear.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Where suffering begins

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The origin of suffering – the idea that we need to have something, become something  or get rid of something – has the power to get any of us heated up.

It is the mind’s relationship to the senses that is the problem

 

Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

We often do not like just being with ourselves

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Sometimes in our lives we have to let go of things which once seemed important in order to allow the space to be filled with new things. However, this requires courage, and we often avoid it by preferring to be occupied, to fill up empty space and time.

Emptiness is the pregnant void out of which all creation springs.

But many of us fear emptiness.

We prefer to remain…surrounded by things…which we imagine are subject to our control.

Wayne Muller