Tag: Present moment

Life changes – it doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The world we are born into is imperfect and unpredictable, sometimes disappointing.  Things change suddenly. We can have a clear plan for some days or a settled direction for our life and then suddenly something surprises us, moving in an opposite direction to what seemed right before. There is much to take in, and our ability to predict what can happen is quite limited. We frequently try to anticipate and maintain some order in our lives, and to remain immune from the inevitable changes that can assail us. When we fail,  we can sometimes find that our moods change – an automatic reaction to things not going  the way we had foreseen. Furthermore, we live with finite human beings who send mixed messages, make mistakes,  and sometimes disappoint us by not acting in the way that we expected.

These changes always seem to catch us by surprise, as if we expect the default position in life to be its predictability. However, if we look around at nature these days we do not get any support for that thesis. It does not behave in predictable ways –  surprisingly mild in Autumn here, while snow falls early in New York and waters flood Bangkok. The television news presents all these as sudden unexpected upheavals, as if some predictable pattern was supposed to be the norm in nature. However we should not really be surprised that calamities and turmoil happen in nature  – or in our inner life –  since this is the nature of the existence  we are born into.

Wisdom comes if we can understand that difficulties are inevitable in this life and when we try to work with them rather than run away from them. It has been shown that the human brain prefers continuity, so change is often accompanied by fear. And often what are we afraid of a lot of the time is the unknown. Meditation invites us to work with the unknown future in whatever form it comes up, no matter how unexpected. We know that we have a choice to be mindful. Whether it is the ongoing economic and currency crisis, or extreme weather conditions, or changes in a relationship, all can be an opportunity for us to work with reality.

Mindfulness tells us that can train our minds to turn these unfavorable circumstances around to make them work to our advantage. It helps us to work with difficulties rather than allowing them to force us into a corner with no answers. Even though it is part of our conditioning to resist change – to hold on to what we label “good” and push away what we label as “bad” – practice helps to see that change is inevitable and that the real suffering comes from resisting it. Thus we try to treat difficulties as just part of nature rather than signs that things have gone wrong. Mindfulness helps us avoid the trap of thinking that the meaning of life is just to get everything working the way we want it. It adapts the mind to life’s realities, and not the other way round.

Moods dictate my behaviour. If something makes me feel good, I want to have it. If it makes me feel bad, I want to get rid of it; if it leaves me indifferent, I ignore it. I find myself in a perpetual state of conflict, emotionally pulled one way and pushed the other. Yet underpinning attraction and aversion is craving: the childish and utopian thirst for a situation in which I finally possess everything I desire and I have repelled everything I dislike. Deep down I insist that a permanent, separate self is entitled to a life removed from the contingencies and uncertainties of existence. 

Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs

Keeping our life whole

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Anything you do to escape the fundamental duality of ego consciousness just kicks more energy into it. Your only choice is to stop. That unsplit, unifying place is found at the fulcrum. This is the holy place, the whole place. The demand for human consciousness to have the “right” thing –  at the exclusion of something else –  just sets the wheel in motion again. There is a kind of consciousness that assists slowing down. If you can honestly assess what is true in your life, looking at it with objectivity and intelligence, this is getting closer.

Practically speaking, if we would spend as much time being alert and aware as we do worrying, we would be out of any mess fairly soon. When you stop fighting your situation, you just have the situation but no longer the struggle to cope with. Generally one can endure that. This is to cease wounding yourself on the jailhouse bars of reality —  to stop complaining about what is.

Robert Johnson

Sunday Quote: When we do not appreciate what we have

Karl Duffy1 Comment

 

You cannot avoid paradise.

You can only avoid seeing it.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Not believing the propaganda of Moods

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Our moods can be strong at times, and may be so at times today, but they are not the most reliable place to look if we want to get a true picture of our own worth or of what to do. In the long-term they rarely give correct messages about our  lasting happiness.They frequently get in the way of us experiencing what is happening directly, and we lose a lot of the richness which is before us each day, as we are caught in these strong internal states.

Moods come with grand words and general ideas, but as intelligences they are less than we are, prone to think in terms of the best and the worst, and to make unnecessary comparisons that squeeze out life. At sunset there is no best or worst..….. A mood can only remove us from the evening’s sharpness. It is common to think of moods and despairs as genuinely earned and as part of our personality but that is their deception – they are propaganda from the Ministry of Despair and the Department of Grandiosity. When Psyche turns away from them, when the meditation continues to plod humbly along, these moods, like other old advertisements, wither and grow stale.

John Tarrant, The Light inside the Dark

When stressed, shift attention

Karl Duffy2 Comments

On the same theme as recent posts,  but applying it as a practical way of dealing with the stresses and crises that arise during our working day. This is an easy-to-apply way of breaking the cycle of stress reactivity – divert your attention to your physical environment, like the touch of your hands on the keyboard, your breathing, or your feet in contact with the floor. See if you can create a small break from the spinning of the mind by tuning into the sensations of the body.

To gain composure at stressful moments, we can apply the mindfulness effort of letting go – abruptly shifting our attention from our thoughts to the immediacy of our physical environment. By suddenly being mindful in this way, we discover a stillness, an emotional space of “not knowing” , like opening a door to an unknown room or leaping from a diving board. When we are mindful in the immediate moment, the chaotic flood of emotions no longer vies for our attention like a crowd of loud, unruly voices. Instead they focus and settle into a physical feeling, unclear and murky, but no less powerful – a tickle in the stomach, a vague softness around the heart, or an openenss in the throat.

Michael Carroll, At Times of Risk and Stress, Cultivate Stillness

Grey days

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The past few days have dawned quite grey, and this has hardly lifted at all during the course of the day.   Like all other types of weather this can be a useful metaphor for the mind. We frequently fall into the trap of thinking that we see things directly and clearly, when rather it is truer to say that we see them through the filters of our  mental and emotional conditioning. For example, we often expand a lot of energy worrying about future events, many of which never came to pass in the manner imagined. It is as Mark Twain said, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened”. However this  does not prevent us from believing that we see the clearly what is going to happen, when in actual fact we am looking through the fog of our own interests and fears. This means a lot of our energy goes into not what is actually happening in that moment, but into the anticipations of what may happen in the future.

One of the reasons for meditation is the cultivation of clear seeing. We practice meditation to strengthen our ability to  pay attention to this moment instead of getting lost in the fog that we’re usually in. It is one way of trying to see the world clearly, and not getting stuck in the wanderings of our minds, no matter what is the changing “weather” of our moods or experiences. To do this we try to sit under all kinds of circumstances, whether we are well or sick, whether we’re in a good mood or down, whether we feel our meditation is going well or is completely falling apart. In this way we develop a consistency.  and see that meditation is rather about staying with ourselves, in this moment, no mater what that is like.  Clear seeing starts with becoming aware of some of the habitual patterns in our thinking, our defense mechanisms, and the ways we rehearse life, rather than live it directly

“This is an essential discovery: our experience of life and the world is strongly flavoured by our own internal cycles of mental weather – sunny, foggy, rainy, sunny, misty, cloudy – and around and around we go: jealous, proud, anxious, craving, excited, deflated. When we look closely we see that we have deeply ingrained habits of distracting ourselves from the present.”

Gaylon Ferguson Natural Wakefulness