Tag: Present moment

When complicated gets in the way

Karl Duffy2 Comments

What I encourage is a moving toward simplicity, rather than complexity. We’re already complicated personalities. Our cultural and social conditioning is usually very complicated. We’re educated and literate, which means that we know a lot and have a lot of experience. This means that we are no longer simple. We’ve lost the simplicity that we had as children and have become rather complicated characters….What is most simple is to wake up – it’s as simple as that. The most profound teaching is the phrase “wake up”. Hearing this, one then asks, “what am I supposed to do next?” We complicate it again because we’re not used to being really awake and fully present. We’re used to thinking about things and analyzing them; trying to get something or get rid of something; achieving and attaining.

Ajahn Sumedho, Intuitive Awareness

Meeting and disengaging

Karl Duffy1 Comment

mazeMost of the work of the practice then is just about noticing what stimulates, alarms or otherwise pushes our buttons, and working with that. It’s about restraining the free-wheeling mind, turning away from sources of powerful attraction, checking the impulse and reactions, softening the ill-will and tension and widening into the body to release the energy of the activation. And more subtly, it’s about meeting and disengaging the ‘should be’s’. So: I walk up and down my meditation path feeling nothing special and practise staying with that; facing a group of school children and wanting to bring something into their lives that will withstand the floods of commercialism, I hold and relax with that; or, at a management meeting, I listen to the gloomy analysis of the monastery’s finances, without dismissing or panicking over that. Meet it, disengage from the script of it even as you widen to receive its wave – and let that move through you. Then trust what arises within when the self-impression passes.

Ajahn Sucitto, Reflections.

Ordinary circumstances

Karl Duffy2 Comments

It is natural to look for things you want outside of where you are now. That is the whole point of a journey. Yet this moment is all anyone has. So if freedom, love, beauty, grace, and whatever else is desirable are to appear, they must appear in the now. It would be nice if they appeared in the now you have now. And if they are to appear and endure they will have to be found in ordinary circumstances, since ordinary circumstances fill most of life.

John Tarrant, Bring me the Rhinoceros and other Zen Koans

A relaxed approach

Karl Duffy3 Comments

sitting33

 

Why do you focus so hard when you meditate?
Do you want something?
Do you want something to happen?
Do you want something to stop happening?
Check to see if one of these attitudes is present.
The meditating mind should be relaxed and at peace.
You cannot practise when the mind is tense.

Sayadaw U Tejaniya, Right Attitude

Training the mind

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30481195_e1fd7690bbListening to your own heart is really very interesting. This untrained heart races around following its own habits. It jumps about excitedly, randomly, because it has never been trained. Train your heart!…Meditation is about the heart; it’s about developing the heart or mind, about developing your own heart. This is very, very important.

Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart

The moon just shines

Karl Duffy2 Comments

P1000422The symbol for compassion is one moon shining in the sky while its image is reflected in one hundred bowls of water.  The moon does not demand, “If you open to me, I will do you a favor and shine on you.”  The moon just shines.  The point is not to want to benefit anyone or make them happy.  There is no audience involved, no “me” and “them.”  It is a matter of an open gift, complete generosity without the relative notions of giving and receiving.  That is the basic openness of compassion: opening without demand.  Simply be what you are.  Be the master of the situation.  If you will just “be,” then life flows around and through you.

Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting through Spiritual Materialism