Tag: Mindfulness

Stress is in the mind

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We are living in a very stressful time with all the successes of Western civilization, Western education and technology, the miracles that the West has performed! And it continues — there is no end to it. Yet people have not become more peaceful and contented. In fact they feel even more stressed by it all. So the problems of modern society in the West are coming not from a lack of anything, from tyrannical governments or from anything terribly wrong, but just from the level of stress in the mind — the speed, the nervousness, the tension, the tendency to get caught up in things and having no way of letting go, no understanding of the nature of things. So people end up taking drugs, drinking a lot, seeking sensory deprivation, trying to bury their heads in the sand; they go off to remote islands in the Pacific or do anything they think will help them find some inner peace…..[However] The silence, the cessation of suffering, is now; it is here and now, in the mind; we don’t have to go anywhere to get it. One can bear with conditions because the silence is not from denying or rejecting, but from understanding, from letting go, and from realizing that all is subject to arising and ceasing. In that movement is a stillness and peacefulness that all of us can experience and know directly for ourselves.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Still Silence

Seeing the depths in time

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Experience has its own secret structuring. Endings are natural. Often what alarms us as an ending can in fact be the opening of a new journey – a new beginning that we could never have anticipated; one that engages forgotten parts of the heart. Due to the current overlay of therapy terminology in our language, everyone now seems to wish for “closure.” This word is unfortunate: it is not faithful to the open-ended rhythm of experience. Creatures made of clay with porous skins and porous minds are quite incapable of the hermetic sealing that the strategy of “closure” seems to imply. The word completion is a truer word. Each experience has within it a dynamic of unfolding and a narrative of emergence. Oscar Wilde once said, “The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realized is right.” When a person manages to trust experience and be open to it, the experience finds its own way to realization.

The nature of calendar time is linear; it is made up of durations that begin and end. The Celtic imagination always sensed that beneath time there was eternal depth. This offers us a completely different way of relating to time. It relieves time of the finality of ending. While something may come to an ending on the surface of time, its presence, meaning, and effect continue to be held into the eternal. This is how spirit unfolds and deepens. In this sense, eternal time is intimate; it is where the unfolding narrative of individual life is gathered and woven.

John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

Sunday Quote: Simplify

Karl Duffy1 Comment

 

In the pursuit of learning,

every day something is acquired.

In the pursuit of wisdom,

every day something is let go of.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Distilling life down to three actions

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Every year, everything
I have ever learned in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.

To live in this world you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods

Surprising things which we hold on to

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Eckhart Tolle believes we create and maintain problems because they give us a sense of identity. Perhaps this explains why we often hold onto our pain far beyond its ability to serve us. We replay past mistakes over and over again in our head, allowing feelings of shame and regret to shape our actions in the present. We cling to frustration and worry about the future, as if the act of fixation somehow gives us power. We hold stress in our minds and bodies, potentially creating serious health issues, and accept that state of tension as the norm.

Though it may sound simple, Ajahn Chah’s advice speaks volumes: “If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace.” There will never be a time when life is simple. There will always be time to practice accepting that. Every moment is a chance to let go and feel peaceful.

Lori Deschene, 40 Ways to Let Go and Feel Less Pain, Tiny Buddha Blog

Drawing a line and knowing when to stop

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The tendency in today’s world is to do more and more, to take on more tasks and responsibilities, to have a certain pride when telling people that we are “very busy”. For some this can mean the need to do more and more study, for others the push to get more achieved in a day, and for some others it even extends to an anxiety  to develop their inner life as one other thing to be “done”. However, all of this energy can mean that we find it hard to allow our work or our activities feel sufficient for the day or for the week. We find reflections on this in all wisdom traditions. The Gospel of Matthew tells us that “sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof “, encouraging us to deal with one day at a time, and not dwell excessively in the future. And I have always found the French translation of a familiar phrase from the Our Father to be more insightful than the English – Donne–nous aujourd‘hui notre pain de ce jour – “Give us this day our bread for this day”. In other words, enough to support us this day and no more. It encourages us to let go at the end of a day – or a working week – and be content.   There is a great benefit for our overall wellbeing in drawing limits to the amount we try to do.

“Enough” is a verb, a conversation, a fugue, a collaboration. It is not a static state, something achieved or accomplished. It is relational, by nature unpredictable, punctuated by wonder, surprise, and awe. It may feel dangerous and inefficient. It demands that we stay awake, pay attention to what is true in this moment, in our hearts, and make the choices always and only from that place. Then whatever we decide brings a sense of rightness and sufficiency, arriving with an exhale, a letting go, a sense that this, here, for now, is enough.

A life of enough is born in every moment — in the way we listen, the way we respond to the world, the way we see what is and tell the truth of who we are. Every single choice, every single moment, every change of course can bring us closer to a life of peace, contentment, authenticity, and easy sufficiency, a life of being, having, and doing enough.

Wayne Muller, A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough