Tag: Stress Reduction

Rushing, time, and opening to our lives

Karl Duffy4 Comments

File:Child drawing.jpg

It doesn’t actually take any more time to say good-bye or hug you know, your children or whatever it is in the morning when you’re on your way to work. But the mind says, ‘I don’t have any time for this.’ But actually that’s all you have time for, is this because there’s nothing else than this…So when your four year-old can’t decide which dress she wants to wear, that’s not a problem for you, unless you make it a problem for you. That’s just the way four year-olds are. And the more we can sort of learn these lessons the more we will not be in some sense running towards our death, but in a sense opening to our lives.

Jon Kabat Zinn

photo D Sharon Pruitt

In the present

Karl Duffy3 Comments

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Our way is to practice one step at a time,

one breath at a time,

with no gaining idea.

Shunryu Suzuki

When Taps leak, and other things go wrong

Karl Duffy2 Comments

https://i0.wp.com/static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Money/Pix/pictures/2007/10/31/TapC.jpg

The moment in which the mind acknowledges ‘This isn’t what I wanted, but it’s what I got’,  is the point at which suffering disappears. Sadness might remain present, but the mind … is free to console, free to support the mind’s acceptance of the situation, free to allow space for new possibilities to come into view.

Sylvia Boorstein, Happiness is an Inside Job

Keeping distracted

Karl Duffy2 Comments

phones subway

The best-adjusted person in our society is the person who is not dead and not alive, just numb. When you are fully alive you are constantly saying “No” to many of the processes of society, the racism, the polluted environment, the nuclear threat,  the arms race, drinking unsafe water and eating carcinogenic foods. Thus it is in the interest of society to promote those things that take the edge off, keep us busy with our fixes, and keep us slightly numbed-out and zombie-like. In this way our modern consumer society itself functions like an addict.

Anne Wilson Schaef, When Society Becomes an Addict

Breaking problems down

Karl Duffy1 Comment

evening sun kildare

Gentle, slow, walking – best done  in nature – sends a signal to the brain and by slowing down the body we slow down the rushing mind.  It can put things in perspective and prevent us from living all the time in our heads:

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
 But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
 hills and a cloud.

Wallace Stevens, Of the Surface of Things

Remembering to stop today

Karl Duffy5 Comments

File:A pause (2418455126).jpg

The first step we take in developing mental well-being, and employing mind training, is remembering that in every moment we can choose how to direct our inner life. Most of us live our lives in reactive mode – we respond to things as they happen without considering our response. We are on automatic pilot. Lacking a sense  of inner control, we typically respond by trying to control the world and others. So step one is simply setting the intention to be aware. It is remembering to stop so you give ourself a choice in how to react. It is remembering that we are in control of our emotional life….Our inner experience may be positive, it may be mundane, or it may be disturbing, but we are the only ones in control of it.

Karuna Cayton, The Misleading Mind