wellbeing – Page 136 – Mindfulbalance

When things don’t work out

January 12, 2012January 11, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Sooner or later, everyone will face not getting what they want. How we respond to this unavoidable moment determines how much peace or agitation we will have in our life. In truth, this is the moment that opens all others. For it is our acceptance of things as they are and not as we would have them that allows us to find our place in the stream of life. Free of our entitlements, we can discover that we are small fish in the stream and go about our business of finding the current.

This deeper chance to shed our willfulness doesn’t preclude our sadness and disappointment that things aren’t going the way we had imagined. But when we stay angry and resentful at how life unfolds beyond our will, we refuse the gifts of being a humble part in the inscrutable whole. When we stay angry and resentful that —and you can fill in the blank— the stock market didn’t reward our conscientious investing or the hurricane destroyed the truck we were going to inherit or the promotion we earned was given to someone else or the person we love so deeply doesn’t care in the same way, we risk getting stuck.

Eventually, we are asked to undo the story we’ve been told about life — or the story we have told ourselves — so we might drop freshly into life. For under all our attempts to script our lives, life itself cannot be scripted. It’s like trying to net the sea. Life will only use our nets up: tangle them, sink them, unravel them, wear them down, embed them in its bottom. Like the sea, the only way to know life is to enter it. How then do we listen below our willfulness?

Mark Nepo, Not Getting what We Want

Today, Notice what goes right

January 12, 2012January 11, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

Each of us is like a mosaic, with lots of lovely tiles, some that are basically neutral, and a few that could use a little – ah – work. It’s important to see the whole mosaic. But because of the brains negativity bias, we tend to fixate on what’s wrong with ourselves instead of what’s right. If you do twenty things in a day and nineteen go fine, what’s the one you think about? Probably the one that didn’t go so well.

Your brain builds new structures based on what you pay attention to. Focusing on the “bad” tiles in the mosaic that is you keeps feeding an underlying sense of being mediocre, flawed or less than others. And it blocks the development of the confidence and self-worth that comes from recognizing the good tiles. These results of the negativity bias are not fair. But they’re a big reason why most of us have feelings of inadequacy or self-doubt.

Rick Hanson, Just One Thing

Staying open in our work

January 10, 2012January 10, 2012 Karl Duffy2 Comments

You must remain open to the possibilities and resist the temptation to make a closure before your life has run out. This means always keeping your very identity open-ended, because a life work defines you. Spiritual writers sometimes say that all finite loves point to an infinite love, and so there is always a yearning for more. The same could be true of a life work. Any finite task or career points to another beyond it. Your sense of what you are meant to do with your life has to remain open-ended, no matter how much or how little you feel you have accomplished. You never know fully what you are called to do.

Thomas Moore, A Life at Work

Seeing things from a different perspective today

January 9, 2012January 8, 2012 Karl Duffy3 Comments

My favorite picture is earthrise as seen from the moon. It’s perfect. A great blue and green ball floating in vast black space, hanging right there in its orbit. From that vantage point, the scene on earth is awesome. creatures being born, other ones dying; plants blooming on one side, plants withering on the other; snow snowing, winds blowing, volcanoes erupting, earthquakes shivering, people talking, music playing. From the moonview, its incredible cosmic drama. From our usual view, inside the drama, looking up at the moon, it’s a different story. It changes from the drama to my drama and gets to be a problem. If you’re far enough away, it’s not your story – its one of the six and a half billion stories.

Sylvia Boorstein: It’s Easier than you Think

Not always struggling with our sadness

January 7, 2012January 7, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

As I have written before, modern society is not very comfortable with any nuances in happiness. It invariably prefers to portray people’s lives as always happy and show that successful people have gotten it all together. There is no real place for a narrative that contains moments of struggle or periods when less obvious forms of growth are nurtured. This can mean that we fall in to the trap of interpreting all sadness or mundane moments as an indication that we are doing something wrong, or that our life is on the wrong track. Frequently we fail to see that a lot of the models presented to us are not valid representations of our lives. And many images we see can easily turn into thoughts of an idealized future where we will be happier, thinner, more popular, and these thoughts may undermine the place we are actually called to be. This can be especially present in the weeks after Christmas and New Year, moments that some people find tough and when the media is full of strategies, advice and initiatives to improve our life and achieve greater success. A different strategy is cultivated in mindfulness practice, based on staying close to where we actually are, acknowledging that a sense of groundlessness or loneliness is normal in humans, and that part of practice is learning to sit with this.

If we are feeling unhappy, what is called for is a willingness to simply be with that unhappiness. If we’re not careful, we say something’s wrong, though it doesn’t really help to say that. We say it either inwardly or outwardly. This projecting of blame is a consequence of having made an inner mistake of misperceiving our unhappiness, sadness or suffering as being something wrong. We don’t receive it just as it is. We don’t acknowledge it and feel it, allowing it to happen; we don’t have the ‘knowingness’ to see it as activity taking place in awareness. Because we don’t have that perspective, we struggle to do something about our suffering, to deal with it in some way. To say that something has gone wrong and that it’s somebody’s fault is a heedless way of dealing with our unpleasant experiences. The habit of consistently doing this is a symptom of what I call the compulsive judging mind.

Ajahn Munindo

Where is the point of life to be found?

January 7, 2012January 6, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We could say that meditation doesn’t have a reason or doesn’t have a purpose. In this respect it’s unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

Alan Watts