Tag: wellbeing

……and developing spaciousness.

Karl Duffy2 Comments

So let’s go back to our experience-body,  focus on it, and let things happen within that focus,  without pushing or trying to find anything, or come to a conclusion. In that context, when we come out of wanting something to happen, there’s some spaciousness – and when a feeling comes up, try to attune to that spaciousness. Develop an attitude and energy of not-feeding, demanding, pushing away, skipping off or proliferating around the feeling. This is non-attachment. By practicing in this way, we realize that for these few moments we don’t have to solve the problem of existence, or know who we are, or what we’re going to do. By being with something that we can directly attend to, not through inference or report, we can find an interesting point of nondependence.

Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

Stop fixing and choosing and doing and making….

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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, an ache, visions, 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. A whole new process comes into being that would not have been there if you were always fixing and choosing and doing and making. This way you’re allowing something to take place within your heart.

Norman Fischer

Noticing the effects of a frantic age 4: Shutting out

Karl Duffy1 Comment

In a world of dwindling resources, where each person’s share of the physical realm decreases over time, it is no wonder that physical reality fails to satisfy. But thanks to the new, intimate, glowing handheld mobile devices, the unsatisfactory real world can be blotted out, and replaced with a cleansed, bouncy, shiny version of society in which little avatars utter terse little messages. In the cyber-realm there are no sweaty bodies, no cacophony of voices to suffer through — just a smooth, polished, expertly branded user experience.

While riding the subway through the Boston rush hour, I have been able to observe just how well these personal electronic mental life support units work in shielding people from the sight of their fellow-passengers…. with more and more people in obvious distress. By focusing all of their attentions on the tiny screen, they are also spared the sight of our well-worn and crumbling urban infrastructure. It is as if the physical world doesn’t really exist for them, or at least doesn’t matter. But as Masanobu Fukuoka put it, “If we throw Mother Nature out the window, she comes back through the door with a pitchfork,” and as we ignore the physical realm, the physical economy (the one that actually keeps people fed and sheltered and moves them about the landscape) shrinks and decays.

Dmitry Orlov

Leaning into fear

Karl Duffy2 Comments

In the Christian calendar, November 2nd is the day set aside for remembering those who have died in the past year, as well as members of our own families who have died.  The origins of this are probably found in the basic awareness of the approach of winter and the shortening of the days, which  speak to us of change and the impermanence of all things. It also can help us reflect on the other losses and disappointments which have occurred this last year and in our lives. Such moments can provoke fear and anxiety in us. As we are reminded here, one way of working with fear is not to turn away from it, but to turn towards and rest with the sensation it raises in the body.

Leaning into suffering does not mean losing our balance and getting lost in suffering. Because our usual stance in relating to suffering is leaning away from it, to turn and face suffering directly serves as a correction. As we lean in, we are inviting, moving toward what we habitually resist…leaning in can help us become aware and free in the midst of our experience.

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Noticing the effects of a frantic age 2: The Sabbath Manifesto

Karl Duffy1 Comment

One response to the increasingly frantic and plugged-in character of today’s world can be seen in an initiative entitled “The Sabbath Manifesto”. This manifesto was developed by a small group of artists, writers, filmmakers and media professionals who began to feel the need to respond to an increasingly fast-paced way of living.  The idea developed to set aside one day of the week – based on the ancient notion of Sabbath –  to unwind, unplug, relax, reflect, get outdoors, and spend time with loved ones. They created Ten core Principles to guide their  efforts on those days, principles such as “Find Silence“, “Avoid Commerce“, “Get Outside”, “Connect with Loved Ones” and “Avoid Technology“. Their efforts to promote reflection on taking periodic vacations from the technology jungle have met with some media interest, and they promote a “National Day of Unplugging” , the next one taking place on March 23-24, 2012. They are not beyond using technology to help them, recommending an app to help people take a “digital detox”. Their site is an encouragement to all to reflect on the role which technology is playing in their lives.

That such a reflection is necessary can be seen in anecdotal reports from some therapists about couples who are so busy that they communicate almost entirely through text, email and phone messages and of families where each member may be in the same room but everyone is on a separate screen, be it a laptop checking mail, or computer gaming, or texting or watching tv.  Another increasing phenomenon is that of checking more than one screen at a time, such as checking email or texting while watching television or a movie. Further evidence of technology’s effect can be seen in ongoing research on the brain, which I will look at in the next post.

www.sabbathmanifesto.org/about

Taking time to rest today

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Resting is a very important practice; we have to learn the art of resting. Resting is the first part of meditation. You should allow your body and your mind to rest. Our mind as well as our body needs to rest. The problem is that not many of us know how to allow our body and mind to rest. We are always struggling; struggling has become a kind of habit.

When an animal in the jungle is wounded, it knows how to find a quiet place, lie down and do nothing. The animal knows that is the only way to get healed-to lay down and just rest, not thinking of anything, including hunting and eating.  What it needs is to rest, to do nothing, and that is why its health is restored.  In our consciousness there are wounds also, 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.

Thich Nhat Hahn