Tag: wellbeing

Balance, rooted in the body

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Healing is a natural  result of finding true balance.

If we relate to a balanced ease in the body, it brings us into the balance of our minds, and it is only from that basis that we can get a feel, through the tangle of anxieties and mood swings, of a simple thread of emotional ease and psychological space. It’s a shift from being tense or on guard, to something more trusting. And it’s through attending to this that we can step back from the biases and old narratives.

Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma

Seeing the mind as organizing

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The brain freezes the world into discrete mind moments, each capturing a barely adequate morsel of information, then processes these one by one in a rapid linear sequence. The result is a compiled virtual world of experience, more or less patterned on what’s `out there,’ but mostly organized around the needs and limitations of the apparatus constructing it. It is like the brain and its senses are hastily taking a series of snapshots, then stringing them together into a movie we call `the stream of consciousness.’

Andrew Olenszki, Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism

In front of our eyes

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Meditation is misunderstood as something you envision in your head, when in fact it is something to be seen with your own eyes.

What you begin to see is that the place where you thought your life occurred —  rumination and memory,  anxiety and fear — isn’t where your life takes place at all. Those mental recesses are where pain occurs, but life occurs elsewhere, in a place we are usually too preoccupied to notice, too distracted to see: right in front of our eyes.

The point of meditation is to stop making things up and see things as they are.


Karen Maezen Miller

A solid place

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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When you think about yourself and who you are, who you should be, who you would like to be, who you do not want to be – how good or bad, wonderful or horrible you are, all this whirls around, it goes all over the place. One moment you can feel ” I am a really wonderful person”, the next moment you can feel ” I am an absolutely hopeless, horrible person”. But if you take refuge in awareness, then whatever you are thinking does not make much difference, because your refuge is in this ability of awareness, rather than in the gyrations and fluctuations of the self-view.

Ajahn Sumedho, Intuitive Awareness

Photo: Ansgar Walk

Starting from where you are

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Coming home

Be gentle with yourself. Be kind to yourself. You may not be perfect, but you are all that you have to work with. The process of becoming who you will be, begins first with the total acceptance of who you are.

Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

Aimlessness

Karl Duffy3 Comments

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It is our tendency in daily life to become goal oriented. We know where we want to go, and we are very focused on getting there. At times, this may be useful, but often we forget to enjoy ourselves along the way. Apranihita is a Sanskrit word meaning “wishlessness” or “aimlessness.” We don’t need to keep running after something, because everything is already here, within. Often we tell ourselves, “Don’t just sit there, do something!”  But when we practice awareness, we discover that the opposite may be more helpful: “Don’t just do something, sit there!” We can train ourselves to stop from time to time throughout the day, to come back to the present and let go of our worries and preoccupations. When our minds and bodies are calm, we can see our situations more clearly and we know better what to do and what not to do.

Thich Nhat Hanh