Tag: Present moment

Practicing mindfulness in daily life 1.

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

One way of developing a more conscious approach to life is to create gaps during the day, short moments where we pause and pay more deliberate attention to what we are doing. This “informal mindulness” practice reduces  the mind’s tendency to over-analyze and compliments the formal practice we do when we are in sitting meditation.

A number of acticvities can be chosen to practice with. It is best to choose a repetitive simple task which you perform on a regular basis. One possibilitiy is taking a shower. While having the shower practice bringing your full attention to the sensations of what you are doing –  touch, taste, smell, sound,  sight – and stay close to being fully present at that level.

So. for example,  you can attend to the sound of the water, as it comes out from the shower, or the touch of it as it hits your body, the temperature of the water. You can be aware of the smell of the soap or shampoo, and the sight of the water drops on the walls or as it goes down the drain. You can focus on the steam rising. Finally, you can be as fully present as piossoible with the movement of the body and the arms.

As in formal practices, thoughts will arise. you simply touch them gently, without judging, and let them go, coming back to practice a greater awatreness of sensations, strengthening your capacity to distinguish between a sensation and a thought.

Peace is something that we can bring about if we can actually learn to wake up a bit more as individuals and a lot more as a species; if we can learn to be fully what we actually already are; to reside in the inherent potential of what is possible for us, being human.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Just being with what is

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

I like to think of mindfulness simply as the art of conscious living.

In fact, the most important point is just to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Stopping the war

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

I think Carl Rogers said it best. He said the great paradox was that it was not until I accepted myself just as I was that I was free to change. In other words  – acceptance,  pausing and being with our life just as it is, is the the precondition to all transformation. For us to be free, we need to stop believing the thoughts that something is wrong.  We need to stop running away  from the very vulnerability that needs a profound type of  self-compassion. Whatever we cannot embrace with love or with acceptance imprisons us. It keeps us in the trance of a bad self. So the path of emotional healing is really the path of stopping the war, of pausing, of not believing the judgments, of not continuing to punish ourself. Instead of running away and trying to escape the rawness that is here, really meeting it with a deep,  deep compassion.

Tara Brach, Meditations for Emotional Healing

Jabbering

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

All we need to do is awaken to the here-and-now

– to stop jabbering to ourselves –

and be present in this moment.

Steve Hagen

Always generating judgments

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to your own experience.  To do this requires that you become aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experience and learn to step back from it.

When we begin practicing paying attention to the activity of our own mind, it is common to discover that we are constantly generating judgments about our experience.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Where we should invest

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The 2008 Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists at Imperial College, London was told that the evidence-base for the therapeutic value of meditation for a wide range of health problems was significantly stronger than most pharmaceutical products. A new meta-analysis of 823 randomly controlled trials of meditation, conducted by the US National Institute of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, showed the clinical benefits of meditation across a wide range of physical and emotional disorders.

Meditation is a way of life rather than quick fix achieved by using gimmicks such as incense, music and light, Dr Avdesh Sharma, past president of the Indian Psychiatric Association, said. It doesn’t work immediately. You need to practice it for several weeks before the effects begin to be felt. Dr Sharma added: If meditation was a drug, we’d all want shares in it. It has a beneficial effect on most physical health problems and is very effective for mental health problems significantly reducing levels of depression, anxiety and insomnia by improving relaxation, oxygenation of the brain, and energy levels.