Tag: Stress Reduction

When you get stuck behind a tractor

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:A traffic tail back behind a tractor by the former Coedana Rectory - geograph.org.uk - 1399270.jpg

It always happens when we are on the way to some appointment….trapped in our schedules, trapped in our cars…

Our old people noticed this from the beginning. They said that the white man lived in a world of cages, and that if we didn’t look out, they would make us live in cages too.

So we started noticing. Everything looked like cages. Your clothes fit like cages. Your houses looked like cages. You put your fences around your yards so they looked like cages. Everything was a cage. You turned the land into cages. Little squares. Then after you had all these cages you made a government to protect these cages. And that government was all cages. All laws about what you couldn’t do. The only freedom you had was inside your own cage. Then you wondered why you weren’t happy and didn’t feel free.

You made all the cages, then you wondered why you didn’t feel free.

Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder

photo eric jones

Beneath

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File:2016-07-27 Seagull in Zandvoort aan Zee (02) (freddy2001).jpg

Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior.

You are beneath the thinker.

You are the stillness beneath the mental noise.

You are the love and joy beneath the pain.

Eckhart Tolle

photo freddy2001

Contentment: Letting it land

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Acorns falling onto the ground.jpg

One or two practices from different traditions on letting go after work, or at the end of a day or a week, or maybe endings in general. They remind us of the wider perspective mentioned at the start of the week. It is linked to a sense of release, the opposite to the continual striving and adding on which we think will bring contentment.

[When] you get to the end of the meeting, the day, let that unravel. You cultivate the wisdom of no-performance and no-result. You listen to any judgements that are rattling in your mind, establish mindfulness on the mind-state and its feeling, then let the defenses and identities go. It’s a matter of acknowledging the inner helicopter that is hovering over ‘If only this’ and ‘I should have said that’ and ‘How dare they do this!’ and steadily touching the ground. Allow the feeling to be felt and breathe through it. Let it end, even let the wish that it all end come to an end. When the rotor blades stop, just here, on the other side of failure, is purity and release.

Ajahn Sucitto, Happy Deathday

photo muffet

Keeping space in the mind

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Blue grapes in vineyard.jpg

Another Monday morning. For some the beginning of a work week can come too soon, the weekend not allowing enough time to relax and wind down. Even from early the mind starts to speed up and get sucked into the details. To balance this, the wisdom and faith traditions place our daily and weekly activities in a wider context, allowing us to see beyond the dramas which play out in our minds,  with us at the center. They remind us that to hold a bigger, slower,  perspective, and to notice little moments of wonder as they present themselves to us, this day.

The sun,

with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it,

can still ripen a bunch of grapes

as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

Galileo

Monday morning miracles

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fungi

The Lord has spread the delicate net of his presence across the world.
See how He gets under your skin, inside your bones.
If you can’t see Him while you’re alive,
don’t expect a special vision once you’re dead.

Lal Ded (Mother Lalla),  1320 – 1392, Kashmiri Hindu poet and mystic

Where to stay anchored

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File:Boats tied up on Lake McDonald (4457743509).jpg

The past is a memory,

the future is uncertain,

now is the knowing.

Ajahn Sumedho

photo glacierNPS