Tag: Mindfulness

Pieces of a puzzle

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It is so tempting to want the answers before we begin the journey. We like to know the way. We like to have maps. But we are more like a breathing puzzle, a living bag of pieces, and each day shows us what a piece or two is for, where it might go, how it might fit. Over time, a picture starts to emerge by which we being to understand our place in the world.  Unfortunately,  we waste a lot of time seeking someone to tell us what life will be like once we live it. We drain ourselves of inner fortitude by asking others to map our way. At the end of all this stalling, though, we each have to venture out and simply see what happens.

The instructions are in the living, and I confess that of all the times that I thought I liked this or didn’t care for that, not one was of my choosing or yours. For as the Earth was begun like a dish breaking, eternity is that scene slowly reversing,and you and I, and the things we’re drawn to, are merely the pieces of God unbreaking back together.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Allowing emotions, not running from them

Karl Duffy1 Comment

One or two posts these days on how to work with difficult and frightening emotions: Awareness is the key to living fully in each moment, even if the moment contains difficult emotions. It is the same practice  – insofar as it is possible – to spend time with and hold emotions in a non-judgmental awareness without making them into a statement about ourselves or the direction of our lives. Gentleness, kindness and self-compassion are the key to this work, leading to a genuine friendliness toward ourselves and towards whatever passes through the body-mind.

With radical accountability, all emotions are observed as experiences only, pointing nowhere, implicating no one and signifying nothing. Though it is no one’s fault that we have an emotion, it is still essential to hold the emotion fully within awareness without wavering. Emotions need observation and allowance, not our analysis or fixation. The story that accompanies the emotion dies with accountability. The story was never true to begin with; we needed it to provide relief from the pain of being “me”. Though we did not know it at the time, sustaining the story’s untruth through inattention was causing even greater suffering than if we had allowed the pain to express itself in awareness. Radical accountability allows all experience to be itself. 

Rodney Smith, Stepping out of Self-Deception

Widening our love of life

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We prepare to die by pushing ourselves to love less narrowly.

In that sense, readying ourselves for death

is really an ever-widening entry into life.

Ron Rolheiser.

Letting neutral times be neutral

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Autumn sees Nature winding down and moving towards a fallow period, a period of rest, a time when seeds lie buried deep in the earth, and growth happens in a different way.   This helps us to see that times when things are not exciting or noticeable – neither markedly pleasant or unpleasant  – are an integral part of life. There are significant parts of each day when our experience is not strongly flavoured in one way or another. We have periods when little happens, when we rest or stand still.  This is normal, and it doesn’t mean that our lives have lost their focus. If we have a tendency to interpret these periods as if something is wrong,we can generate significant suffering as we are going against a fundamental aspect of human nature itself. As always, the practice is simply to be aware of the feelings as neutral, to not run a storyline around them,  and to rest in them, letting them become calm and peaceful.

If we do not cultivate mindfulness, and we feel a neutral feeling, it can turn into an unpleasant feeling because of its association with boredom. We will feel that nothing special is happening – nothing specially good, nothing specially bad, and from that we will often generate painful stories about being a boring person, having a boring life, the world being boring and actually end up in a painful place. Sometimes it seems that we prefer to have painful feelings because they are somewhat exciting and we seem to feel more alive in them  than with neutral feelings that we equate with non-existence.

Martine Batchelor, The Spirit of the Buddha

A Brand New Day

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The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, it’s a brand new sun. It’s born each morning, it lives for the duration of one day and in the evening it passes on, never to return again. As soon as the children are old enough to understand, the adults take them out at dawn and they say “The sun has only one day. You must live this day in a good way, so that the sun won’t have wasted precious time” Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect with our basic joy.

Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of no Escape.

On not criticizing oneself

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As I have said before, I often find in Ajahn Sumedho’s writings a clarity which cannot be matched. It is the case here. Simply stated, it gets to the heart of the dynamic which causes us so many problems – our tendency to add on to and identify with what passes through the mind and make it into a criticism of ourselves. I recognize these phrases he uses here as ones I use myself and which I frequently hear in talking with people.

You can’t get more simple than mindfulness because it is not anything you can create. It is just a matter of paying attention and being present, it’s not a complicated technique or a complexity. It’s so simple, but we are conditioned for complexity, so we tend to make things complex all the time. You are sitting and observing and then a negative thought arises in your mind and you think “That’s bad”. ‘That’s a compounding. The act of judging it, of putting the label “bad” onto it, makes it more than what it is.

Mindfulness is just aware of presences and absences. It is not concerned whether they are good or bad. It is not looking at them from that critical position. So “bad” is a criticism, or “that’s good”, “that’s right” and “that’s wrong”. And then it goes into “I’m good”, “I’m bad”, “I shouldn’t feel like this” ,  “I shouldn’t have these thoughts or desires”, ” I should be more compassionate and patient”. So you see it gets increasingly more complicated with judgments, criticisms and a sense of self that is identified with these different conditions. It gets even more complicated. If you have a bad thought you think “I am bad, I am a bad person, I am not very good…[then] These thoughts arise because people are inconsiderate and don’t respect me. And because of their lack of sensitivity and understanding, I have these bad thoughts”,  so it gets increasingly more complicated.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Sound of Silence