Tag: Present moment

Learning from the moment

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Another post by Pema Chodron on the basic practice in mindful living – staying with what is right in front of us or happening inside right now.

All religions point to the fact that being fully present is the only state in which you can wake up — not by somehow leaving.

So you have to find your own simple, grounded language to say that to yourself, and that’s a beautiful way to express it: What is this moment, this situation, or this person trying to teach me? Another one that I love is “This is a unique moment. Maybe I’m not so glad about it because it’s painful, but I don’t want to waste it, because it’s never going to happen again this way. So let’s taste it, smell it, experience it”.

Pema Chodron

Invisible kindness

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Every two weeks,  or so,  I facilitate a Support Group for the Hospice volunteers, listening as they share their experiences of being with people towards the end of their life. Each time I am struck by the kind presence which they offer to those who are ill.  After the last meeting it struck me again how being generous requires an ongoing leap of faith, as we often cannot see the effects of our presence or our words. It maybe these  invisible kindnesses, which we offer quietly and without knowing their effect,  are the greatest things we can do in our lives.

In the human world, abundance does not happen automatically. It is created when we have the sense to choose community, to come together to celebrate and share our common story. Whether the ‘scarce resource’ is money or love or power or words, the true law of life is that we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around.

Parker Palmer

Becoming a silent watcher.

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Be present as the watcher of your mind  –  of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations.  Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react.  Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future.  Don’t judge or analyze what you observe.  Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction.  Don’t make a personal problem out of them.  You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.

Eckhart Tolle

Welcoming what is given today

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Gratitude welcomes what we are given. It doesn’t know any stories about how it should have been. To talk about gratitude is also to talk about what prevents gratitude, about resentment and bitterness. Resentment and bitterness are the residue that comes from dashed expectations. Since the world doesn’t fit our stories, there is a tension where I expected life to be more favorable to my hopes than it has been, or feel that the world has not bothered enough with me. That bitterness sticks in the body and the mind, so that the mind reruns its painful stories and the body stores them in awkwardness and discomfort.

John Tarrant, Practices of Gratitude.

Let go of the small sense of self.

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Meditation comes  alive through a growing capacity to release our habitual entanglement in the stories and plans, conflicts and worries that make up the small sense of self, and to rest in awareness. In meditation we do this simply by acknowledging the moment-to-moment changing conditions — the pleasure and pain, the praise and blame, the litany of ideas and expectations that arise. Without identifying with them, we can rest in the awareness itself, beyond conditions, and experience what my teacher Ajahn Chah called jai pongsai, our natural lightness of heart. Developing this capacity to rest in awareness nourishes samadhi (concentration), which stabilizes and clarifies the mind, and prajna (wisdom), that sees things as they are.

Jack Kornfield, A Mind like Sky: Wise Attention, Open Awareness.

Still the mind in order to love

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The eternal moment is outside of time, is not a part of our past or our future, and yet it is lived amidst all our everyday activities. It is in the eternal moment that love is born. Love does not belong to time, and its timeless quality is well known to all lovers. The lover has to learn to still the mind in order to catch the moment and stay true to love’s unfolding. Wayfarers tread a path that leads from illusions of time to the eternal moment that belongs to the soul.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Le, Signs of God