Tag: Present moment

Everyday life is muddy

Karl Duffy5 Comments

The essence of the practice life involves cultivating awareness. This process has two basic aspects. The first is clarifying the mental process. The second is experiencing — entering into awareness of the physical reality of the present moment. When we’re standing in the muddy water of everyday life, practice is often not simple and clear. But part of our challenge is to bring a certain precision and impeccability to our efforts. That’s why it’s important to keep returning to these two basic aspects of practice: first, seeing through the mental process, with all its noise; and second, entering the non-conceptual silence of reality as-it-is. As practitioners we learn to honestly and relentlessly observe the mental or conceptual process — thoughts, emotional reactions, strategies and fears — and then bring ourselves back again and again to the physical reality of the present moment.

Ezra Bayda, How to Live a Genuine Life  

Being and doing

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The weather these past days – heat followed by rain and then more heat – has meant that there is a surge of growth in the fields and along the hedgerows. As always,  I am surprised by its spontaneity and joyful abandon. We can see an unforced wild blossoming all around. In this poem we are asked to reflect on this natural growth and see if our restless planning and hectic schedule leaves any space for going out into the fields of possibility.

Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground bulbs
for flour, how the settler’s hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?
And you — what of your rushed and
useful life? Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments, everything,
leaving only a note: “Gone to the fields
to be lovely. Be back when I’m through
with blooming.”
Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course, your work will always matter.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

Lynn Ungar, What we Share

Staying within the moment

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A key skill for sustaining mindfulness in daily life is being able to distinguish between our experience and our interpretation of our experience. Experience is simply whatever is happening in the moment — a sound, a taste, a body sensation, an emotion, an interaction, etc. Interpretation is the mind’s reaction to our experience. One way to understand this difference is that when we are directly experiencing a moment of life, we are “within” it; when we are interpreting it, we are “outside” it. 

Once you begin to recognize that interpretation is only your view of an experience, it becomes possible for you to begin to release your compulsion to interpret every moment. Ideally, your goal is to create a new habit or “default setting” for responding mindfully rather than reacting unskillfully to all types of experiences….You can begin to break your habit of automatically interpreting every experience by practicing being mindful of your experience within the experience. So when an unpleasant moment arises, be interested in the direct experience of what happens. You might say to yourself,  “I’m just going to be interested in this,” and then watch what happens. Just be in the moment and let the experience form.

Philipp Moffitt, Maintaining Mindfulness in Daily Life

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

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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.

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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