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let go of that region, allowing/inviting it to dissolve in your mind’s eye (your imagination) as the muscles themselves let go and you drop into stillness and open awareness before moving on and connecting with the next region of the body,
Entering into them with openness and attention and acceptance can be profoundly healing, especially if you practice regularly. It feels like a deep nourishing of cells and tissues as well as of psyche and spirit, whole body and soul.
When we focus on the region of the heart, it can be helpful to tune in to any sensations of constriction in the chest, tightness, or heaviness, and be aware of emotions such as grief, sadness, loneliness, despair,
unworthiness, or anger which may lie just beneath the surface of those physical sensations.
Dwell with the breath in various regions of your body, such as the feet, the legs, the pelvis and genitals, the belly, the chest, the back, the shoulders, the arms, the throat and neck, the head, the face, the top of your head. Listen carefully. Allow yourself to feel whatever is present. Watch the sensations in the body flux and change. Watch your feelings about them flux and change.
In hatha yoga practice, the idea is to be fully in your body as you bring awareness to the various sensations, thoughts, and feelings which come up while you are moving, stretching, breathing, holding positions, reaching or lifting with arms, legs, and torso.
Getting down on the floor once a day and stretching your body mindfully, if only for three or four minutes, staying in touch with your breathing and with what your body is telling you. Remind yourself that this is your body today. Check to see if you are in touch with it.
Forgetting or neglecting to be mindful can teach you a lot more than just being mindful all the time.
Are you ready to hold them in awareness as they grip you by the throat, whether your formal practice is strong this week or not? Can you see that not practicing is an arduous practice?
We submit ourselves to constant bombardment by sounds and images that come from minds other than our own, that fill our heads with information and trivia, other people’s adventures and excitement and desires.
And if we are truly not trying to get anywhere but simply allow ourselves to be here in this moment as it is, we can stumble easily upon an ancient stillness—behind and within the play of our thoughts and feelings
But what is required most by patients is simply listening, being present, taking the person seriously, not just the disease.
The whole point of mindfulness-based stress reduction—and for that matter health promotion in its largest sense—is to challenge and encourage people to become their own authorities, to take more responsibility for their own lives, their own bodies, their own health.
I like to emphasize that each person is already the world authority on him- or herself, or at least could be if they started attending to things mindfully.
What is required to participate more fully in our own health and well-being is simply to listen more carefully and to trust what we hear, to trust the messages from our own life, from our own body and mind and feelings.
Developing such an attitude means authoring one’s own life and, therefore, assuming some measure of authority oneself. It requires believing in oneself. Deep down, sadly, a lot of us don’t.
The romantic notion is that if it’s no good over here, you have only to go over there and things will be different.
Too often, our lives cease working because we cease working at life, because we are unwilling to take responsibility for things as they are, and to work with our difficulties.
listen to the great wisdom that is being put out by people who have worked deeply on themselves and have attained considerable understanding and harmony in their lives,
There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation has been faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges.
There is always something to dislike. So why not let go and admit that you might as well be at home wherever you are? Right in that moment, you touch the core of your being and invite mindfulness to enter and heal.
“the precision and openness and intelligence of the present.”
The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.
So I discover that I am frequently pulled by my need to be somewhere else,
When I am able to capture this wave of energy in awareness while I am still at the bottom of the stairs or starting on my way up, I will sometimes slow my ascent—not just one step at a time, but really slow, maybe one breath cycle per step, reminding myself that there is really no place I have to go and nothing I have to get that can’t wait another moment for the sake of being fully in this one.
Notice the inner feelings which push you toward the telephone or the doorbell on the first ring.
Also, try being present for things like taking a shower, or eating. When you are in the shower, are you really in the shower? Do you feel the water on your skin, or are you someplace else, lost in thought, missing the shower altogether? Eating is another good occasion for mindfulness practice. Are you tasting your food? Are you aware of how fast, how much, when, where, and what you are eating? Can you make your entire day as it unfolds into an occasion to be present or to bring yourself back to the present, over and over again?
I get into the round and round or the back and forth, feeling the motion in my whole body, no longer trying to clean the stove so it will look nice, only moving, moving, watching, watching as things change slowly before my eyes. At the end, I wipe the surfaces carefully with a damp sponge.
One big dance of presence, a celebration of now. And, at the end, a clean stove.
live from then on as if he had died that night.
Being dead, he wouldn’t have to worry about how things worked out any longer for himself personally and would be free to devote himself to living as a representative of the universe. The rest of his life would be a gift.
working for humanity as an employee of the universe at large, you get to modify and contribute to your locale by who you are, how you are, and what you do.
So we see the futility and the danger of letting our thinking make any thing or circumstance into an absolutely separate existence without being mindful of interconnectedness and flux.
New cars are already on their way to
the junk heap even before they leave the factory. This awareness might truly enhance our appreciation of impermanence and help us to take things and circumstances and relationships less for granted while they are around.
Mindfulness of breathing is one string on which the beads of our experience, our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, our perceptions, our impulses, our understanding, our very consciousness can be threaded.
We have climbed to a vantage point from which we can more readily perceive wholeness, and can cradle the flow of present moments in awareness.
“If I can’t do anything useful, at least I would like to do as little harm as possible.”
Do you sometimes find that you are hard on and put down? Remember ahimsa in that moment. See it and let it go.
The willingness to hurt comes ultimately out of fear. Non-harming requires that you see your own fears and that you understand them and own them. Owning them means taking responsibility for them. Taking responsibility means not letting fear completely dictate your vision or your view.
Ahimsa is the attribute of the soul, and therefore, to be practiced by everybody in all the affairs of life. If it cannot be practiced in all departments, it has no practical value.
If you can’t love King George V, say, or Sir Winston Churchill, start with your wife, or your husband, or your children. Try to put their welfare first and your own last every minute of the day, and let the circle of your love expand from there.
Here’s how mindfulness changes karma. When you sit, you are not allowing your impulses to translate into action. For the time being, at least, you are just watching them. Looking at them, you quickly see that all impulses in the mind arise and pass away, that they have a life of their own, that they are not you but just thinking, and that you do not have to be ruled by them. Not feeding or reacting to impulses, you come to understand their nature as thoughts directly. This process actually burn up destructive impulses in the fires of concentration and equanimity and non-doing.
Without mindfulness, we are all too easily stuck in the momentum coming out of the past, with no clue to our own imprisonment, and no way out.
fault, or the world’s fault, so our own views and feelings are always justified.
Ultimately, it is our mindlessness that imprisons us. We get better and better at being out of touch with the full range of our possibilities, and more and more stuck in our cultivated-over-a-lifetime habits of not-seeing, but only reacting and blaming.
It is ignorance of how unexamined impulses, especially those colored by greed or hatred, however justified, rationalized, or legal, can warp one’s mind and one’s life.
It means knowing who you are and that you are not your karma, whatever it may be at this moment. It means aligning yourself with the way things actually are. It means seeing clearly. Where to start? Why not with your own mind?
When you stop outward activity for some time and practice being still, right there, in that moment, with that decision to sit, you are already breaking the flow of old karma and creating an entirely new and healthier karma.
Because it is only by being fully in this moment that any future moment might be one of greater understanding, clarity, and kindness, one less dominated by fear or hurt and more by dignity and acceptance.
