Tag: Present moment

On using our time responsibly

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Western laziness is quite different. It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time left to confront the real issues. If we look into our lives, we will see clearly how many unimportant tasks, so-called “responsibilities” accumulate to fill them up. One master compares them to “housekeeping in a dream.” We tell ourselves we want to spend time on the important things of life, but there never is any time. Helpless, we watch our days fill up with telephone calls and petty projects, with so many responsibilities  – or should we call them “irresponsibility’s”?

Sogyal Rinpoche

Caring for what is troubling

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In matters of soul,

it is advisable never to compensate or to try to escape,

but instead to tend better

the very thing that is causing trouble.

Thomas Moore, Soul Mates

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

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

Forgetting and remembering

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One of the most difficult things to remember is to remember to remember. Awareness begins with remembering what we tend to forget. Drifting through life on a cushioned surge of impulses is just one of many strategies of forgetting. Not only do we forget to remember, we forget that we live in a body with senses and feelings and thoughts and emotions and ideas. Worrying about what a friend said can preoccupy us so completely that it isolates us from the rest of our experience. The world of colours and shapes, sounds, smells,  tastes and sensations becomes dull and remote…… To stop and pay attention to what is happening in the moment is one way of snapping out of such fixations. It is also a reasonable definition of meditation.

Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs.

Doing the ordinary

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Stanley Hauerwas, the American theologian,  said that God “takes time for the trivial.” And yet most of the messages we receive today suggest that ordinary life, with its predictable routines,  and not-so-dramatic activities,  demonstrate that our life has lost its direction. Exciting comparisons are held up in advertising, film and the media, which the mind likes to use to convince us that there is something lacking in our life, that we are somehow not doing “well enough”. This can give rise to a feeling within us that without some diversion and drama the ordinary can weigh us down, and we need to continually be on the look out  – normally somewhere else – for a life with more passion, greater creativity, and celebration. The trivial is not where we expect to find God or anything miraculous. So we have a tendency to get it out-of-the-way as quickly as we can in order to make time for our “real” life.  However, we often hear from people who have had an enforced period away from their normal life – for example, hostages who have come back home from their ordeal, or a prisoner released from prison after a wrongful conviction, or someone recovering from an illness – that they look forward to simply sitting in their garden, or walking the dog, or having a cup of tea or coffee in the kitchen. For them, because it was taken away from them, the possibility to do simple daily things is the ultimate treasure. It shows us that the attitude we take, and the story we tell ourselves about, say,  peeling the vegetables or doing grocery shopping,  is the key towards finding a happiness hidden not only in special moments.