Tag: Mindfulness

Let them fade

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It’s helpful to remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing to whatever arises, without picking and choosing. It’s definitely not meant to repress anything, and it’s not intended to encourage grasping either…  To the degree that we‘re willing to see our enmeshment or grasping and our repressing clearly, they begin to wear themselves out…. Up come all these thoughts, but rather than squelch them or obsess with them, we acknowledge them and let them fade.

Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty

Just notice, don’t blame

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Some people once brought a blind man to Jesus and asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ They all wanted to know why this terrible curse had fallen on this man. And Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.’ He told them not to look for why the suffering came but to listen for what the suffering could teach them. Jesus taught that our pain is not punishment, it is no one’s fault. When we seek to blame, we distract ourselves from an exquisite opportunity to pay attention, to see even in this pain a place of grace, a moment of spiritual promise and healing.

Wayne Muller, Legacy of the Heart

Softening, allowing, being with today

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Softness means opening to whatever is there, relaxing into it. At such times try this “mantra”: “It’s Ok. Whatever it is it’s Ok, Let me feel it”. This is the softening of the mind. You can open to your experience with a sense of allowing, and simply be with whatever predominates, a pain, a thought, an emotion, anything.

Softening the mind involves two steps. First, become mindfully aware of whatever is most predominant. That is the core guideline for all insight meditation. So the first step is just to see, to open. For the second step, notice how you are relating to whatever arises….The easiest way to relax is to stop trying to make things different. Rather than try to create another space, simply allow space for whatever is going on.

Joseph Goldstein, Insight Meditation

Trust in the difficult

Karl Duffy1 Comment

People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. The future stands still, but we move in infinite space. How could it not be difficult for us? […]

And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Awareness is the refuge within

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Awareness is your refuge:
Awareness of the changingness of feelings, of attitudes, of moods, of material change and emotional change: Stay with that, because it’s a refuge that is indestructible.
It’s not something that changes. It’s a refuge you can trust in.
This refuge is not something that you create. It’s not a creation. It’s not an ideal. It’s very practical and very simple, but easily overlooked or not noticed.
When you’re mindful, you’re beginning to notice,
it’s like this.

Ajahn Sumedho,

…..where peace comes dropping slow

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Yeats’ father would read to him from Walden when he was a child. Later, when living in London he wrote this poem, wishing he could retire to the quietness of nature on an island he knew as a boy. Most of us do not have the luxury of a real island to go to, but we create our refuge within ourselves and take shelter there when the storms of the day get too strong. We allow the mind and the body to settle, even if only for a brief moment, and allow peace to drop slowly in.

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

WB Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree