Tag: Mindfulness

Practicing mindfulness in daily life 1.

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One way of developing a more conscious approach to life is to create gaps during the day, short moments where we pause and pay more deliberate attention to what we are doing. This “informal mindulness” practice reduces  the mind’s tendency to over-analyze and compliments the formal practice we do when we are in sitting meditation.

A number of acticvities can be chosen to practice with. It is best to choose a repetitive simple task which you perform on a regular basis. One possibilitiy is taking a shower. While having the shower practice bringing your full attention to the sensations of what you are doing –  touch, taste, smell, sound,  sight – and stay close to being fully present at that level.

So. for example,  you can attend to the sound of the water, as it comes out from the shower, or the touch of it as it hits your body, the temperature of the water. You can be aware of the smell of the soap or shampoo, and the sight of the water drops on the walls or as it goes down the drain. You can focus on the steam rising. Finally, you can be as fully present as piossoible with the movement of the body and the arms.

As in formal practices, thoughts will arise. you simply touch them gently, without judging, and let them go, coming back to practice a greater awatreness of sensations, strengthening your capacity to distinguish between a sensation and a thought.

Peace is something that we can bring about if we can actually learn to wake up a bit more as individuals and a lot more as a species; if we can learn to be fully what we actually already are; to reside in the inherent potential of what is possible for us, being human.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Just being with what is

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

I like to think of mindfulness simply as the art of conscious living.

In fact, the most important point is just to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Stopping the war

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I think Carl Rogers said it best. He said the great paradox was that it was not until I accepted myself just as I was that I was free to change. In other words  – acceptance,  pausing and being with our life just as it is, is the the precondition to all transformation. For us to be free, we need to stop believing the thoughts that something is wrong.  We need to stop running away  from the very vulnerability that needs a profound type of  self-compassion. Whatever we cannot embrace with love or with acceptance imprisons us. It keeps us in the trance of a bad self. So the path of emotional healing is really the path of stopping the war, of pausing, of not believing the judgments, of not continuing to punish ourself. Instead of running away and trying to escape the rawness that is here, really meeting it with a deep,  deep compassion.

Tara Brach, Meditations for Emotional Healing

Jabbering

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

All we need to do is awaken to the here-and-now

– to stop jabbering to ourselves –

and be present in this moment.

Steve Hagen

Always generating judgments

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to your own experience.  To do this requires that you become aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experience and learn to step back from it.

When we begin practicing paying attention to the activity of our own mind, it is common to discover that we are constantly generating judgments about our experience.

Jon Kabat Zinn

When things go wrong

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

A lot of practical things went wrong for me today – computers, recordings, simple practical details around courses. This added extra work onto the calendar and in speeding up things gets lost and mislaid. Have you ever noticed that sometimes  when things like this go wrong and disturb us, we have a tendency to think that something is wrong with us or the overall direction of our lives.  We may simply think we are doing too much. Sometimes it can go deeper and we think our whole life is out of sync. We seem to have a deep-down tendency to identify with a difficulty and let that affect how we see ourselves or how our life is going. This can also lead us to split the world into “good” and “bad” – or them and us-  seeing the situation or a person as all bad, and thinking that the best way of dealing with difficulties is to move them completely out of our life. Sadly, this maximizing of distance in order to increase a sense of personal safety often just solidifies our fearful or defensive sense of self.

Splitting is one of the primitive defense mechanisms described from Freud onwards, and is found particularly in Melanie Klein’s work. It is one of the more simplistic ways of dealing with life’s problems, rooted in the baby’s tendency of associating good experiences with a  “good” person and bad experiences with a “bad” person.  It is generally replaced as the child gets older by an understanding that good and bad occasions can reside in the one person and that does not make them “bad”. It is,  nonetheless  a common  way of behaving even in adults.  It is often activated when we are threatened, and means that we are unable to see complexity in a situation or a person, preferring rather seeing it or them as all bad.  It tells us that there is no grey area, and as a result people are frozen into a certain moment or fault and we let that moment define them. We can do it to ourselves also and solidify the most negative core beliefs about ourselves, letting them define our life, seeing it as threatened or frightened.

Mindfulness practice can help us be aware of this and other defense mechanisms arising, – to see fear forming – and help us notice the desire to withdraw –  normally accompanied by a kind of defensive story-line- as it appears.  If we can spot this happening we may have enough of a gap to see the whole drama . If so, we can question what is feeling threatened, whether it is really actually me, or some story which I have about myself and my life. If we can resist the tendency to split we can come to see that everything is actually workable. We can then experience for ourselves that it is ultimately possible to be open to everything, and to keep a compassionate heart available for others and for all that occurs in our lives.