Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Better loops, calmer Karma.
lobster
Crusty Veteran
Part of Buddhist insight/common sense is about instigating improved behavoural loops which influence and effect a movement towards a potentially happier more fulfilled life.
Most of us are familiar with the 8 fold path.
Other powerful loop breaking and positive loop reinforcing exist:
- Cognitive Behavour Therapy
- Positive affirmation and hypnosis
- Good company
https://daringtolivefully.com/positive-karma
Any tips that resonate for you?
3
Comments
Positive and mindful media consumption.
I've been learning a thing or two about myself from watching Clinton Anderson on youtube, dealing with problem horses...he says that when horses misbehave, they are using the REACTIVE side of their brain. His training exercises invite the horses to use the thinking side of their brain. It wasn't until I'd been watching his videos for about a week or two that it hit me that I myself pretty much all of my life, have been using the reactive side of my brain! That definitely gave me something to chew on!
I find a kind of resolve to be very useful. If you discover a pattern of unconscious poor behaviour in yourself, you can remind yourself that change often is easier than you think. After all you are in control, nothing happens without you instigating it, and if you live in clear awareness you can just resolve to do things differently and act. You need to find the repose of doing nothing, which stills a lot of inner impulses, and then on top you do things.
Repeated application of resolve and action creates new patterns and habits, and things become easier over time. You still need to stay alert and support your new pattern with dedication, and sometimes with a reminder of the deep reasons why you want to create this change in your life, but it's something that gains momentum with success, and once you have gone through the resolve process once it is easier to do it with other things.
This is actually a step towards 'conscious living', where insight meditation helps you to spot poor patterns, the just-do-it moment breaks you out of them, and resolve and dedication keep you focused until new patterns establish themselves. I think different people have different strengths and weaknesses in differing areas of this, and you have to find out for yourself.
Being kind to strangers.
I was feeling lousy on the train the other day and when I was getting off at my station there was a young guy trying to lug two huge bags with all his worldly possessions in them. I insisted on helping him and carried one about half a kilometre to his destination. He was very grateful and I felt much better afterwards.
Win win!!!!
Thanks guys. Some great tips. I particularly liked @silver insight, which seems related to @person tip.
Live the good life. Iz plan!
Hence the oft-quoted maxim, "learn to respond, not to react."
It's happened to me several times, that "Ooooh, I get it now!" 'ahaah' moment...
I think we can often hear a wise message and not relise its deeper significance until something else of that ilk - presented in a different manner - hits us upside the back of the head with a wet loofah....
One that I use from time to time, and will doubtless have occasion to use again, is a sports metaphor.
Bonnie St.John was the fastest slalom skier at Innsbruck but did not win gold. She was ahead after the first run, but by the second run the course was icy. There was one spot where every skier fell, and she was beaten by someone who got up faster than she did. She is famous for her observation:
Everyone falls.
Winners get up.
Gold medal winners get up FAST.
Noble Silence is a powerful response. Mind you what would I know, I even gibber during my supposed daily formal sit ...
Softly, softly, catchee monkey [mind]
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sof2.htm
Be thoughtful when thinking is needed and be thoughtless when it is not...
In other words pay attention to your thinking pattern and develop an awareness, that will allow a loose attachment to certain patterns when need be and let the rest just float on by ...
One's thoughts often can be a right charmer when one is not practising the Dharma... So in order for life to be wholesomely karma (calmer), just spent some regular cushion time with the Dharma...
"I" like to think "I" like to think, however thinking does this for 'me' ....
Samyutta Nikaya III 144:
"Bhikkhus [monks, the Buddha said, holding a fleck of dung on his fingernail], if even if that much of permanent, everlasting, eternal individual selfhood/metaphysical being (Pali: attabhava), not inseparable from the idea of change, could be found, then this living the holy life could not be taught by me."
Hope he washed his hands. Maybe it turned into rainbow dust ...
How solid we are - not!
Being kind, calm, collected, mindful etc is an aquired skill. From my cushion observation post, I know I am sitting with god, devil, Buddha Tara, Mara, mama, papa, dead people, siblings, media and my cructacean nemesis. Do I have a big head from all that dung?
Thoughts.
Comes. Goes.
Experience. Gone.
Stay grounded in dharma everyone. Be kind to your mind, just don't believe everything you think ... ultimately Nothing.
and
remember there are conventional truth and Ultimate Truth
^^. Tee Hee.
In the heretical Mahayana, conventional and ultimate are sometimes the same. In tantra, symbol and reality merge. Aye caramba! Ultimately the merger of symbol eg. guru=Buddha is transcended but it can be fraught for the easily befuddled (lobster raises claw).