Tag: Stress Reduction

Letting go of the constant flow

Karl DuffyLeave a comment
As stated earlier, thoughts can make our desire to sit still quite difficult. However, noticing them and, even more importantly,  the emotions that give birth to them is the key towards greater freedom. As we sit, we can easily notice how we are always chasing our tail, moved by a desire to get something other than we have now,   or to get rid of something that is bothering us. The big challenge is to how to switch off this as a process and get to the root of the problem, to discover how we can stop proliferating fears and fantasies and interrupt this quality of “always moving”.  To do this requires that we become skilled at noticing the key moment of “contact”- when the senses, including the mind, encounters something that moves it towards, or away from. We can notice this when we can spot a change in our interior space, when a disturbed, or restless quality takes hold – we were calm one moment, then we see something or remember something or think of something and we are disturbed.  So the practice is to try to notice what it arising, meet it and disengage from it, while bringing our awareness to the process itself. We ask ourselves – “What does it feel like to want this, or to want to get rid of that”….. “How does that concretely feel in the body, or in the heart”?  We practice with trying to  meet this moment without the impulse to fix it, or interpret it or judge it. The traditional teaching state that this is the way to step out of the stream, by not allowing the contact to gain a footing and proliferate:
From where do the streams turn back? Where does the round no longer revolve?
Where does name-and-form cease and stop without remainder?
Where water, earth, fire and air do not gain a footing.
It is from here that the streams turn back
Here that the round no longer revolves
Here name-and-form, ceases, stops without remainder.
Connected Discourses of the Buddha, 68, 69.

Some things will be imperfect today

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Don’t think peace of mind only comes when you have fixed up all your problems and finished all your business. All your worrying, all your striving and struggling, has it ever got you where you really want to be? You can’t control the world and change it the way you would like it. Therefore you can only find peace of mind and achieve the meaning of life when  by embracing the imperfections of life. How do you do that? By knowing that imperfection is in the nature of the world.  So make peace with imperfection.

Ajahn Brahm

Why weekend rest should include the mind

Karl Duffy2 Comments

In our consciousness there are wounds, lots of pains. Our consciousness also needs to rest in order to restore itself. Our consciousness is just like our body. Our body knows how to heal itself if we allow it the chance to do so. When we get a cut on our finger we don’t have to do anything except to clean it and to allow it the time to heal, because our body knows how to heal itself. The same thing is true with our consciousness; our consciousness knows how to heal itself if we know how to allow it to do so. But we don’t allow it. We always try to do something. We worry so much about healing, which is why we do not get the healing we need. Only if we know how to allow them to rest can our body and our soul heal themselves.

But there is in us what we call the energy of restlessness. We cannot be at peace with ourselves. We cannot be peaceful. We cannot sit; we cannot lie down. There is some energy in us to do this, to do that, to think of this, to think of that, and that kind of restlessness makes us unhappy. That is why it is so important for us to learn first of all to allow our body to rest. We have to learn how to deal with all our energy of restlessness. That is why we have to learn the techniques of allowing our body and our consciousness to rest.

Thich Nhat Hahn.

Not defined by past experiences

Karl Duffy4 Comments

You may struggle to understand your authentic self. For instance, you may unconsciously assume that you are the collection of old habits of mind that you have accrued over your lifetime in reaction to difficulty, disappointment and uncertainty. You may believe you are someone who is anxious because as a child you had to endure a constant stream of criticism from your parents. Or you may see yourself as a failure because you haven’t achieved your career goals. But these conditioned  mind states are not you – they are merely thoughts and feelings. These thoughts and feelings, as you can observe for yourself, are temporary and ever-changing, and arise episodically. So while they may characterise your experience sometimes, they don’t define you. Your authentic self is defined by the values from which you respond to these mind states.

Phillip Moffitt, Emotional Chaos to Clarity

Space is always available to us

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Usually when we’re all caught up, we’re so engrossed in our storyline that we lose our perspective. The painful situation at home, in our job, in prison, in war, wherever we might find ourselves – when we’re caught in the difficulty, our perspective usually becomes very narrow, microscopic even. We have the habit of automatically going inward. Taking a moment to look at the sky or taking a few seconds to abide with the fluid energy of life, can give us a bigger perspective – that the universe is vast, that we are a tiny dot in space, that endless, beginningless space is always available to us. Then we might understand that our predicament is just a moment in time, and that we have a choice to strengthen old habitual responses or to be free. Being open and receptive to whatever is happening is always more important than getting worked up and adding further aggression to the planet, adding further pollution to the atmosphere.

Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap

Models of success

Karl Duffy5 Comments

A “successful” life has become a violent enterprise.  We make war on our own bodies, pushing them beyond their limits; war on our children, because we cannot find enough time to be with them when they are hurt and afraid, and need our company; war on our spirit, because we are too preoccupied to listen to the quiet voices that seek to nourish and refresh us; war on our communities, because we are fearfully protecting what we have, and do not feel safe enough to be kind and generous; war on the earth, because we cannot take the time to place our feet on the ground and allow it to feed us, to taste its blessings and give thanks.

The more our life speeds up, the more we feel weary, overwhelmed and lost. Despite our good hearts and equally good intentions, our life and work rarely feel light, pleasant or healing. Instead, as it all piles endlessly upon itself, the whole experience of being alive begins to melt into one enormous obligation. It becomes the standard greeting everywhere: “I am so busy.” We say this to one another with no small degree of pride, as if our exhaustion were a trophy, our ability to withstand stress a mark of real character. The busier we are, the more important we seem to ourselves and, we imagine, to others. To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know that the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single mindful breath — this has become the model of a successful life.

Wayne Miller,  Sabbath