Tag: Present moment

Every moment has potential

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Looking back, I can see that my biggest obstacle at the time was that I thought of meditation as something that would help me get rid of the parts of myself that I didn’t like. I sincerely hoped that meditation would lead me to happy, peaceful states of mind where panic and fear could not touch me. Yet what my father was leading me to was much more radical than that: He wanted me to see that the only way out of suffering is to move toward it; that the path of true awakening lies in experiencing every single moment, whether pleasant or painful, with complete and unconditional love.

Unconditional love is something we can immediately see the value of when it relates to others, but how often do we think of cultivating unconditional love for ourselves? How often do we not only accept, but even cherish our own tender spots and painful feelings?  What my father taught me in those early years was that when we simply let be and open ourselves to the richness of the present moment, we experience every thought, feeling, and experience as an expression of the mind’s luminous nature. From the perspective of awareness, no thought or emotion is any better or any worse than another. They are all manifestations of the mind’s infinite potential.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

Being in nature makes the heart bigger

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Took this photo on this beautiful morning,  walking near the barley fields at the foot of the Jura. It does scant justice to the sweep of the mountains and the wideness of nature. We draw such scenes into our heart and take a sense of openness from them. In their space we find space.

By association with nature’s enormities, a man’s heart may truly grow big also. There is a way of looking upon a landscape as a moving picture and being satisfied with nothing less big as a moving picture, a way of looking upon tropic clouds over the horizon as the backdrop of a stage and being satisfied with nothing less big as a backdrop, a way of looking upon the mountain forests as a private garden and being satisfied with nothing less as a private garden, a way of listening to the roaring waves as a concert and being satisfied with nothing less as a concert, and a way of looking upon the mountain breeze as an air-cooling system and being satisfied with nothing less as an air-cooling system. So do we become big, even as the earth and firmaments are big. Like the “Big Man” described by Yuan Tsi, one of China’s first romanticists, we “live in heaven and earth as our house.”

Lin Yutang

Setting an intention for this day

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

 

I have noticed that folks are generally as happy

as they make up their minds to be

Abraham Lincoln

Simple daily practices 1: Relax the body

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

There are many simple practices that support the transformation of the mind. These are easy to do at any time throughout the day and prevent us from getting caught in patterns of preoccupation. One practice is to relax the body, particularly the eyes and face, whenever we can remember. When the face is more open and the eyes are soft, the mind tends to connect with the present moment with increasing ease. We have found that this particular practice supports the letting go of powerful and unconscious habits of mind. We can disentangle ourselves more rapidly from those thoughts, feelings and sensations that consistently propel us into the next moment. we can settle into the here and now without always attaching to some agenda of what should or shouldn’t be happening.

Michael Liebenson Grady

A type of addiction

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The issue is not so much the presence or absence of thought activity during meditation. Rather, the issue is the degree to which ones thought activity is driven, unconscious and fixated.

The great majority of human beings are literally addicted to thinking. Even the most wretched substance abuser can go a few hours between “fixes,” but most human beings cannot abide even for a few seconds without some sort of “thought fix.” If there’s nothing significant to think about, we fill the void with fantasy and trivia. Simply stated, meditation breaks the addiction to thinking. One is then in a highly desirable situation. When you want to have a complete experience of hearing and feeling (for example as you listen to music), you can do so without being compulsively pulled into thoughts which are not relevant to the music. When you want to have a complete experience of tasting and feeling, as when enjoying a bite of food, you can likewise do so. On the other hand, when it is appropriate to think, you find that your thinking abilities are vastly improved.

Shinzen Young

….recognizing our stories

Karl Duffy1 Comment

 

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images,

the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience

Joan Didion