Tag: Present moment

Living your life in tune with all of life

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

To me this would be the best way to live — to situate yourself within your life in such a way as to feel that your own life was unfolding with the pattern of all of life. I suppose this might seem megalomaniacal, but I see it as quite humble. My life isn’t mine, it is just life living itself through me. I think, if you lived your life like that, then a lot of what bothers you wouldn’t bother you any more, and a lot of things that don’t bother you now would seem very important, very personal.

Norman Fischer

Moving close to fear

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Whenever fear arises – either in a sudden wind of panic or a low-grade brooding anxiety – the approach of mindfulness is to fully feel the fear, to move towards it rather than running away. The fire of fear is usually mixed up with the smoke of explanations, abstract considerations that attempt to tame the fear through various storylines about the fear. These storylines move us away from feeling directly.

The healthiest way to be with fear is simply that – to be the fear rather than trying to solve it or successfully manipulate it from a distant vantage point. Approaching fear from a distance is like having a giant pair of chopsticks – fear is at the end of them, twenty-five feet away from us, and we keep trying to move the fear from kitchen counter to dining table and back again. No wonder it keeps spilling onto the floor! Instead we could approach fear as a finger food – using the bare hand to pick it up directly, place it in the mouth, chew and swallow.

Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Wakefulness

Where we are stuck

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The process of practice is to see through, not to eliminate, anything to which we are attached. We could have great financial wealth and be unattached to it, or we might have nothing and be very attached to having nothing. Most practice gets caught in this area of fiddling with our environment or our minds. “My mind should be quiet.” Our mind doesn’t matter; what matters is nonattachment to the activities of the mind. And our emotions are harmless unless they dominate us (that is, if we are attached to them) — then they create disharmony for everyone. The first problem in practice is to see that we are attached. As we do consistent, patient practice we begin to know that we are nothing but attachments: they rule our lives.

But we never lose an attachment by saying it has to go. Only as we gain awareness of its true nature does it quietly and imperceptibly wither away; like a sandcastle with waves rolling over, it just smoothes out and finally — where is it? What was it?

Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

Becoming one who sees

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Despite the incredibly warm weather, the berries have appeared on the bushes in the garden. They reminded me of this quote,  and its encouragement to see into the heart of things, happening in each moment of the day. Sometimes we are just to preoccupied and hurried to notice.  We let life – and heaven – pass by,  unnoticed.

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes…

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh


Noting, rather than reacting

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Buddhadasa Bhikkhu said, “If there was to be a useful inscription to put on a medallion around your neck it would be ‘This is the way it is’.” This reflection helps us to contemplate: wherever we happen to be, whatever time and place, good or bad, ‘This is the way it is.’ It is a way of bringing an acceptance into our minds, a noting rather than a reaction.

The practice of meditation is reflecting on ‘the way it is’ in order to see the fears and desires which we create. This is quite a simple practice. Many methods of meditation are very very complicated with many stages and techniques – so one becomes addicted to complicated things.  However, the more simple we get, the more clear, profound and meaningful everything is to us.

So with the breath of the body, the weight of it, the posture of it, we are just witnessing and nothing, observing how it is, now, in this moment. The mood of the mind, whether we feel bright or dull, happy or unhappy, is something we can know – we can witness. And the empty mind, empty of the proliferations about oneself and others, is clarity. It’s intelligent, and compassionate. The more we really look into the habits we have developed, the more clear things become for us.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Way it is

Enjoying living

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Autumn is a season of maturity, of patience and integration. As I have said before, it reminds us to look at the seasons and growth in our own life, our path towards maturity and greater individualization. This is demanded of us at every stage in our life but comes to the fore more clearly in “mid-life”, when we are asked to let go of some of the typical first half of life thinking patterns and move into a second half thinking style. It is a challenge that everyone faces, although not everyone takes it up. If we do, as Levinson remarks here, we can let go of some of the pressured, achievement-focus drive which is characteristic of the first half of life (and of the modern age) and have the space to notice and enjoy the process of living itself.

Some reduction in illusions is now appropriate and beneficial……According to Jaques, the central issue at mid-life is coming to terms with one’s own mortality: a man must learn now, more deeply than was possible before, that his own death is inevitable and that he and others are capable of great destructiveness…..Bernice Neugarten identifies the basic mid-life change as a growing “interiority” : turning inward to the self, decreasing emphasis on assertiveness and mastery of the environment, enjoying the process of living more than the attainment of specific goals.

Levinson, The Seasons of a Man’s Life.