wellbeing – Page 115 – Mindfulbalance

The light of Summer

June 20, 2012June 13, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark;
the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Plato

Demystifying the relationship we have with our mind, our thoughts and emotions, is the essence of the mindfulness practice. It is like switching on the light in a dark room; no matter how long a room has remained in a state of darkness, once we turn on the light, everything is illuminated.

Dzigar Kongtrul, Light Comes Through: Buddhist Teachings on Awakening to Our Natural Intelligence

Always switched on

June 15, 2012June 14, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them…To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — continuously. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.

We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking.

Linda Stone, Continual Partial Attention

Lives as a to-do list

June 14, 2012June 14, 2012 Karl Duffy2 Comments

Better is one handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and grasping after the wind. Ecclesiastes 4:6

Often our lives become so driven that we are moving through our moments to get to better ones at some later point. We live to check things off our to-do list, then fall into bed exhausted at the end of the day, only to jump up the next morning to get on the treadmill once again. This way of living, if we can call it living, is compounded by all the ways in which our lives are now driven by the ever-quickening expectations we place on ourselves and that others place on us and we on them, generated in large measure by our increasing dependence on ubiquitous digital technology and its ever-accelerating effects on our pace of life. If we are not careful, it is all too easy to fall into becoming more of a human doing than a human being, and forget who is doing all the doing, and why.

Jon Kabat Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners

A way of working with emotions when we feel flooded

June 14, 2012June 13, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

As I referred to recently, I was in the UK last week on a retreat directed by Ajahn Sucitto. So I quote him here, partly in reference to the very unseasonal weather they are having there, with communities struggling with severe flooding. Like most weather conditions, flooding can help us in our reflection on the mind, on how to work with things that we cannot control, or things in our life change without us expecting them.

Mindfulness, the ability to bear witness is a tremendously powerful and skilful factor of mind. The Buddha called mindfulness the floodstopper. It stops the floods of greed, hatred and delusion. With mindfulness we give ourselves a choice with regard to following what arises in the mind; and keeping that choice available is something you want to go on doing because the mind almost longs to get trapped – and there are plenty of sights, sounds, flavours and ideas that can sweet you away out of aware responsibility. As we carry our body with us all the time, we can use that as a base for mindfulness; a place where we can stop the floods. We can turn our attention to the body and just refer to the body in the body, as it is – that is as sensations, energies and form, rather than the impressions of beauty or ugliness that identification imposes upon it.

Ajahn Sucitto, Seeing the Way.

Changing our relationship to our expectations

June 12, 2012June 10, 2012 Karl Duffy2 Comments

We can learn to recognize that the difficulty is our path instead of trying to escape from it. This is a radical yet necessary change in our perspective. When uncomfortable things happen to us, we rarely want to have anything to do with them. We might respond with the belief ‘Things shouldn’t be this way’ or ‘Life shouldn’t be so messy.’ Who says? Who says that life shouldn’t be a mess? When life is not fitting our expectations of how it’s supposed to be, we usually try to change it to fit our expectations. But the key to practice is not to try to change our life but to change our relationship to our expectations — to learn to see whatever is happening as our path.

Ezra Bayda

Becoming grounded in the wind

June 11, 2012June 11, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

I spent the last ten days on retreat in England, where the weather was far from what could be likened to Summer. They are calling it a European Monsoon, and certainly, one day, the wind blew strongly, breaking branches from the trees and even making standing still quite difficult. A bit like our ongoing, daily, experience of the mind:

Our minds are like flags in the wind, fluttering this way and that, depending on which way the wind blows. Even if we don’t want to feel angry, jealous, lonely, or depressed, we’re carried away by such feelings and by the thoughts and physical sensations that accompany them. We’re not free; we can’t see other options, other possibilities. The goal of attention, or shamatha, practice is to become aware of awareness. Awareness is the basis, or what you might call the “support,” of the mind. It is steady and unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached. When we recognize and become grounded in awareness of awareness, the “wind” of emotion may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward, watching the shifts and changes with the intention of becoming familiar with that aspect of consciousness that recognizes “Oh, this is what I’m feeling, this is what I’m thinking.” As we do so, a bit of space opens up within us. With practice, that space—which is the mind’s natural clarity—begins to expand and settle.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoché