Tag: Stress Reduction

Seeing through thoughts

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Most of us are trained to believe that if we think something is good, it is good, and if we think something is bad, it is bad. But as we practice simply watching our thoughts come and go, such rigid distinctions begin to break down. If we continue to simply allow ourselves to be aware of the activity of our minds, we’ll very gradually come to recognize the transparent nature of the thoughts, emotions, sensations and perceptions we once considered solid and real. It’s as though layers of dust and dirt were slowly being wiped away from the surface of a mirror

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

The process of working with difficulties

Karl Duffy1 Comment

As a practice, this process can be summarized. First of all there is the matter of view.  This means acknowledging……that the anxiety……however reasonable, is causing you suffering. There’s a tightness in your chest, an unsettledness in your belly, a tendency to go into red alert. Now the point is not to say “I shouldn’t worry” or  “It’s a natural concern” but just to acknowledge your feeling of anxiety. Then there’s the practice: you are actually experiencing anxiety as it is happening, as an embodied feeling, with no should or shouldn’t about it. The next aspect is to steady your awareness around that feeling and let go of interpreting it, dismissing or trying to fix it. Just be with that feeling. Then breathe into the feeling, widen and soften your awareness. Relax a little, give yourself time, ease the energies associated with that feeling. Then tune into the spaciousness, the empathy and the direct clarity of the awareness of that feeling and let the feeling do what it needs to do in order to be felt.

 Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

A simple three part practice

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First, come into the present. Flash on what’s happening with you right now. Be fully aware of your body, its energetic quality. Be aware of your thoughts and emotions.

Next, feel your heart, literally placing your hand on your chest if you find that helpful. This is a way of accepting yourself just as you are in that moment, a way of saying, “This is my experience right now, and it’s okay.”

Then,  go into the next moment without any agenda

Pema Chodron, Living Beautifully

A way to freedom

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The attempt to look at your attitude — what you are feeling and thinking and the frame that holds it –

and then your attitude to your attitude,

is one of the routes to freedom

John Tarrant, In the Wild Places

Making time for nature

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Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement seems to ignore the tranquility of nature by pretending to have a purpose. The loud plane seems for a moment to deny the reality of the clouds and of the sky, by its direction, its noise, and its pretended strength. The silence of the sky remains when the plane has gone. The tranquility of the clouds will remain when the plane has fallen apart. It is the silence of the world that is real.

Thomas Merton

Making time to nourish ourselves

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What is balance in a society whose skewing of time has it totally off-balance? What is balance in a culture that has destroyed the night with perpetual light and keeps equipment going twenty-four hours a day because it is more costly to turn machines on and of than it is to pay people to run them at strange and difficult hours? In the first place balance for us is obviously not a mathematical division of the day. For most of us our days simply do not divide that easily. In the second place, balance for us is clearly not equivalence. Because I have done forty hours of work this week doesn’t mean that I will have forty hours of prayer and leisure. What it does mean, however, is that somehow I must make time for both. I must make time or die inside.

Joan Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

photo:guido gerding