Tag: Stress Reduction

Take a step back

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File:Flickr - Nicholas T - Floored.jpg

The engine that makes this go is taking a step back and trusting the body, trusting the breath, trusting the heart. We’re living our lives madly trying to hold onto everything, and it looks like it might work for awhile but in the end it always fails, and it never was working, and the way to be happy, the way to be loving, the way to be free is to really be willing to let go of everything on every occasion or at least to make that effort. So the practice really works with sitting down, returning awareness to the body, returning awareness to the breath. It usually involves sitting up straight and opening up the body and lifting the body so that the breath can be unrestrained. And then returning the mind to the present moment of being alive, which is anchored in the breath, in the body. Then, of course, other things happen. You have thoughts, you have feelings. You might have a pain … memories, reflections. All these things arise, but instead of applying yourself to them and getting entangled in them, you just bear witness to it, let it go, come back to the breathing and the body, and what happens is you release a whole lot of stuff in yourself.

Normal Fischer

photo nicholas a. tonelli

Not leaning forward

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zen tea.

If your relationship to the present moment is not right,

nothing can ever be right in the future –

because when the future comes, 

it’s the present moment.

Eckhart Tolle

Being with

Karl Duffy1 Comment

cup of coffee

Mindfulness is simply being aware of what is happening right now without wishing it were different;

Enjoying the pleasant without holding on when it changes (which it will);

Being with the unpleasant without fearing it will always be this way (which it won’t).

James Baraz

Speeding up or slowing down

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Busy.jpg

What I’ve noticed is that there are two main ways that fear of uncertainty affects us, at least initially. One is that we speed up and the other is that we get very lazy. As I’ve talked with people many of them share their experiences of how a basic level of nervousness causes them to speed about even in their own homes, bouncing from room to room and task to task and never quite finishing anything. People talk about going back and forth between one thing and another, emailing and calling people on the phone. …Lazy is the other way to go. It is the opposite of speed, and yet these two seeming opposites  are both about the same thing: avoiding being present with our fear of uncertainty. You procrastinate. You feel unworthy. Laziness has a frozen quality. You spend hour after hour on the computer, not as a form of speediness, but just distracting yourself, trying not to feel what’s underneath what you’re feeling, trying to avoid touching the uncertainty and uneasiness.

Pema Chodron

photo trishna datta

Life is like this

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Life is like this. You can’t say it’s a banquet all the time.  Breath going in… I wouldn’t describe that as a banquet, or that the sound of silence is life at its best, where it’s just one laugh after another.  It’s just like this. Most of our experience is neither one extreme  nor another; it’s like this…[yet]..there  are ways of  noticing that even within what can be physically unpleasant –   like cold, dampness and things like this – that we find unpleasant as sensory experiences, that the real suffering  is the aversion: “I don’t like this. I don’t want life to be like this. I want to be where there are blue skies and sunshine all the time.”… When you’re seeking happiness and trying to get away from pain and misery, then you’re caught in always trying to get something or hold on to happiness. That leads to an extreme again — wanting, always grasping after the ideal of some refined conscious experience.
Ajahn Sumedho, Intuitive Awareness

Without effort

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With no mind, flowers lure the butterfly;
With no mind, the butterfly visits the blossoms.
Yet when flowers bloom, the butterfly comes;
When the butterfly comes, the flowers bloom.

Taigu Ryokan, Japaneses Zen Poet, 1758 – 1831