Present moment – Page 355

Lost in interpretation

June 1, 2012May 27, 2012 Karl Duffy8 Comments

When confronted with a difficult experience, the untrained mind wants to be anywhere but in the present moment, where it perceives acute unpleasantness. The mind becomes anxious whenever it’s uncertain and reacts as if one’s survival is at stake. So rather than staying with the experience and determining the best possible way to relate to it, the mind jumps to creating a story that involves worrying about the future or judging oneself or others based on past experiences. This pattern of resistance to staying present in experience is an automatic response arising from the limbic brain as it detects threats. Ironically, the story imparts a false sense fo knowing what’s going on, and therefore can seem temporarily soothing.

Philipp Moffitt, Emotional Chaos to Clarity

Making friends with yourself

May 30, 2012May 30, 2012 Karl Duffy6 Comments

In meditation practice, you work directly with your confused mind-states, without waging crusades against any aspect of your experience. You let all your tendencies arise, without trying to screen anything out, manipulate experience in any way, or measure up to any ideal standard. Allowing yourself the space to be as you are — letting whatever arises arise, without fixation on it, and coming back to simple presence — this is perhaps the most loving and compassionate way you can treat yourself. It helps you make friends with the whole range of your experience.

As you simplify in this way, you start to feel your very presence as wholesome in and of itself. You don’t have to prove that you are good. You discover a self-existing sanity that lies deeper than all thought or feeling. You appreciate the beauty of just being awake, responsive, and open to life. Appreciating this basic, underlying sense of goodness is the birth of maitri — unconditional friendliness toward yourself.

John Welwood, The Practice Of Love

No criticism, no struggle

May 30, 2012May 28, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Mindfulness is first of all the ability to recognize what is happening in the present moment. It is a simple recognition – without judgment or criticism, without suppression or attachment. I breathe in and I am aware that the in-breath is here. I breathe out, and I am aware that the outbreath is here. There is no criticism or struggle. There is no effort to reject anything or grab on to it.

Thich Nhat Hahn, You are Here

Field of Poppies, May 28, 2012

Direct seeing

May 29, 2012May 23, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

The utmost care and attention is needed to see the internal drama fairly, accurately, dispassionately, in order to express it as it is seen. What we mean by “being made to feel good” or “getting hurt” is the internal enhancing of our ongoing me-story, or the puncturing and deflating of it. Enhancement or disturbance of the me-story is accompanied by pleasurable energies or painful feelings and emotions throughout the organism. Either warmth or chill can be felt at the drop of a word that evokes memories, feelings, passions. Conscious or unconscious emotional recollections of what happened yesterday or long ago surge through the bodymind, causing feelings of happiness or sadness, affection or humiliation.

[But] Can we experience freshly, directly, when hurt or flattery is taking place? What is happening? What is being hurt? And what keeps the hurt going? Can there be some awareness of defenses arising, fear and anger forming, or withdrawal taking place, all accompanied by some kind of story-line? Can the whole drama become increasingly transparent? And in becoming increasingly transparent, can it be thoroughly questioned? What is it that is being protected? What is it that gets hurt or flattered? Me? What is me? Is it images, ideas, memories? Can the instant connection between thought and sensations become palpable? The immediacy of it. No I-entity directing it, even though we say and believe I am doing all that. It’s just happening automatically, with no one intending to “do” it. Those are all afterthoughts!

Toni Packer, What is This Me?

Softening the mind

May 28, 2012May 23, 2012 Karl Duffy2 Comments

Softness means opening to what is there, relaxing into it. At such a time try this mantra: “It’s ok. Whatever it is, it’s ok. Let me feel it” . That 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. Firstly, 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. Often we can be with an arising appearance but in a reactive way. If we like it we tend to hold on to it, we become attached. If we do not like it because it is painful in any way, we tend to contract, to push away out of fear, irritation or annoyance. 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