Tag: Stress Reduction

A short meditation exercise for when you feel under pressure

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Close your eyes gently. Let your body be at rest and your breathing be natural. Begin to listen to the play of sounds around you. Notice those that are loud or soft, far and near. Notice how sounds arise and vanish on their own, leaving no trace. 

After you have listened for a few minutes, let yourself sense, feel or imagine that your mind is not limited to your head. Sense that your mind is expanding to be open like the sky – clear, vast like space.  Feel that your mind extends outwards beyond the most distant sounds. Imagine there are no boundaries to your mind, no inside or outside. Let the awareness of your mind extend in every direction, like the sky.

 Relax in this openness and just listen. Let every sound you hear – people, the breeze, your breath – arise and pass away like a could in the open space of your mind.  Let thoughts and feelings – pleasant, unpleasant – come and go without resistance or struggle. Relax and rest in this openness.  Let sensations float and change. Pay attention to consciousness itself. Notice how the open space of awareness is clear, transparent, timeless and without conflict – allowing for all things, but not limited by them. This is your own true nature. Rest in it. Trust it. It is home.

Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart

Where the tension in our lives comes from

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The moment we stray from where we are, we create a tension between two places – where we are and where we are thinking of being. It is this tension that blocks us from the sensation of being fully alive, because being split in our attention prevents us from being authentic – even though managing many tasks at once (being skilful in splitting our attention)  is considered intelligent.

For most of us, straying from where we are and coming back is a never-ending task, very much like blinking and breathing. When we incorporate the fullness of attention into our daily lives, we seldom notice it. But if we should interrupt our flow of being, we will stumble just as surely as if we were to stop seeing or breathing. That we stray from the moment is not surprising. The more crucial thing is that we return. 

Mark Nepo, The Book Of Awakening

Stress is in the mind

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We are living in a very stressful time with all the successes of Western civilization, Western education and technology, the miracles that the West has performed! And it continues — there is no end to it. Yet people have not become more peaceful and contented. In fact they feel even more stressed by it all. So the problems of modern society in the West are coming not from a lack of anything, from tyrannical governments or from anything terribly wrong, but just from the level of stress in the mind — the speed, the nervousness, the tension, the tendency to get caught up in things and having no way of letting go, no understanding of the nature of things. So people end up taking drugs, drinking a lot, seeking sensory deprivation, trying to bury their heads in the sand; they go off to remote islands in the Pacific or do anything they think will help them find some inner peace…..[However] The silence, the cessation of suffering, is now; it is here and now, in the mind; we don’t have to go anywhere to get it. One can bear with conditions because the silence is not from denying or rejecting, but from understanding, from letting go, and from realizing that all is subject to arising and ceasing. In that movement is a stillness and peacefulness that all of us can experience and know directly for ourselves.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Still Silence

The way this universe works

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Whenever you experience any pain or difficulty, always remember one of the deep meanings of the word “suffering” : asking the world for something it can never give you. We expect and ask impossible things from the world. We ask for the perfect home and job and that all the things we work hard to build and arrange run perfectly at the right time and place. Of course, that is asking for something that can never be given…. That’s not the way this universe works. If you ask for something that the world cannot supply you should understand that you are asking for suffering.

So whether you work or meditate, please accept that things will go wrong from time to time. Your job is not to ask for things the world cannot give you. Your job is to observe. Your job is not to prod and push this world to make it just the way you would like it to be. Your job is to understand, accept and let it go.

Ajahn Brahm, The Art of Disappearing.

Opening to how things actually are

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Sometimes we experience dukkha quite directly in our meditation: our knees hurt and our backs hurt and our minds hurt. At other times it’s more subtle. We can’t seem to concentrate; we feel restless, we don’t think we are doing very well. Then our perception of suffering comes from seeing that we cannot control things. Many many times I told my teacher, Sayadaw U Pandita,  “Things are going very badly. My head hurts …and my mind is all over the place and I cannot practice. Things are really bad”.  He would just say, “That’s dukkha isn’t it”  I would look at him expectantly, waiting for him to tell me the magic trick, that one technique that would make all the suffering go away…… But all he would say is “That’s dukkha isn’t it”.

After a while I began to hear what he was saying. “This is a rightful perception”, he was telling me. “This isn’t just a personal drama. This is an opening into one aspect of life. This is part of how it is. This experience has to be seen and acknowledged.” You don’t have to immerse yourself in suffering or get lost in it; but in order to be fully open,  you have to let the truth of dukkha in as well. It does not mean that we should be passive or that taking action is never appropriate. Rather it means that we hurt ourselves most by fervently trying to control things so that we never have to suffer.

Joseph Goldstein, Suffering

Why stillness is difficult, and movement is easy

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A central ingredient in most forms of practice is stillness…. [But…] It takes time to really see that thoughts and emotions are mere movements of the mind. They are, after all, the fabric of who we think we are, and everything we do is an expression of thought and emotion. We take them so seriously. But take a closer look, test this against your own experience, and see for yourself. If we can gain this recognition, we are on our way to freedom,  for instead of being sucked into the contents of our mind and acting out everything that arises within it, we will watch those contents melt like snowflakes on a hot rock.

According to the Bon tradition… we have about eighty thousand thoughts a day, which means the mind moves eighty thousand times a day. We can feel the velocity of this movement within the first five minutes of sitting meditation. This discovery then leads to the next: the voluntary and involuntary movements that constitute our life are just the mental extensions of the voluntary and involuntary movements of our mind. We move physically because we move mentally. Our fundamental addiction to movement, therefore, is habituation to the movement of mind. We are addicted to thought.

Andrew Holecek, The Power and the Pain.