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.
the power of mindfulness
I feel as though being mindful is unbelievably powerful. To know that you're making skillful decisions is something else. It's almost like a high, that meditative state you get in when you're mindful and making skillful choices. That is all. 
0
Comments
well it all started with a sort of enlightenment I had(I realize it's not the final enlightenment, it's just the best word to use), so I guess it started with right view. Soon after I began developing the other steps to the path, and that's where i'm still at. Actually I wasn't even a buddhist before this. After my epiphanies I thought I had figured a lot of stuff for my own path out, so I began to want to research other religions just to take what truth I could find from them. I decided to look into buddhism, and wow the ideas in buddhism are the same stuff I was thinking about on my own! It's incredible, i've never before felt so confident in a "religion" before. A lot of the things buddhism teaches I had already thought of on my own, and the rest of it is making sense. I love it.
Also part of it that to me is intertwined with the path is that I have been able to be one with the universe in a way that most aren't even aware you can be. It's like, I can tell what i'm supposed to do based on what the world around me tells me. I like to think of this as the tao.
Then a few things went wrong and I got upset and things got worse and I got busy dealing with life and now all that mindfulness is gone. I don't even have the energy to get up and meditate in the mornings. It's hard to keep it up.
The worst part is that the insight I feel like I gained is still there. The little progress I made with Right View, I mean, is still there. I don't think I can go back on that. But my daily practice, the mindfulness which helps with everything is, is totally GONE.
This just leads to a state a depression for me. Better when I didn't have Right View and could just get wrapped up in the mundane stuff I was doing. But now I have this nagging feeling all the time that what I'm doing isn't really important and my mind is scattered about a million other things and I'm tired all the time.
Yup.
This is when I realize why Buddhism is a religion and not just a philosophical practice. If I could wake up in the morning with the sense of devotion and urgency that one has when they have a deep feeling of religious belief, well this would motivate me to get back to work. But I don't know how to find that or cultivate that. Instead I'm just sort of mopey.
Sorry if this didn't make any sense or if I'm posting in the wrong place or stealing your thunder. Just you described very well what it was like for me a year ago.
Interesting. I hope that doesn't happen to me. I mean, I don't think it will cuz it all started with that change in outlook which led to me finding buddhism and start trying to act mindfully which has just made it better and better, so i'm seeing the benefits.
Great.
I'm gonna try to meditate while in this state I think, see what happens.
It's about "The Journey", not the destination.
Right, this is a big part of practice. Ajahn Chah said "if you let go a little you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely you will know complete peace and freedom."
I like this quote. I'm a naturally very analytical overthinking type of person, so this whole way of thinking is kinda new to me. I have the natural tendancy to over think, and I think the biggest hurdle for me is "letting go."
Me too, but at least we know what we have been doing wrong.
As Ajahn Brahm says, the reason why people think too much is because they over-value their thoughts. Such people believe that they can think their way to solving problems. While it might be true in the short-term, they may solve their short-term problems, people who over-think will go looking for new problems to solve...there is no end to it, no peace to be found in it.
So now that we know what we have been doing wrong, with practice we can stop fuelling our habitual thinking. Instead of valuing habitual thinking we should value peace.
I really like this paragraph. That's exactly how it is. I figure something out and I feel like it's this huge breakthrough and I think that I may have finally figured it all out but then soon enough I create a new problem to solve. It's maddening. At this point I know intellectually that I can't solve the great mystery with my mind, but to be honest I still feel like at some level I can.
But I want to say one thing that is in my mind when I read what you say. When I first start learning about something (anything, including Buddhism) it is first very exciting. Then it starts to blow my mind. Then, I get to the top of the mountain, so to speak, and get a clear view of what is on the other side. What I mean is, when you really start to get a grip on any subject, there is this peak when you realize how much you don't know and how much more you have to learn. It's like you work your butt off just to find out how stupid you are!
So my study of Buddhism blew my mind and then I was left feeling totally changed and incompetent.
On the other hand, this might be entirely MY experience and have nothing to do with how you are feeling. You might be able to keep up the experience and practice! For me, it was a case of going to fast and burning out. I mean, how long can those mind-blowing feelings persist? Maybe forever and I just went about it wrong. But this time, I'm going more slowly.
Gosh I hope this doesn't sound like I'm trying to discourage you. I'm not. I think my motivation is in trying to understand my own experience.
I can be mindful at times, but I am definitely not consistent. I've also experienced the good things that come from being mindful. For me it's not anything spectacular, but it's something I can really appreciate, and I am very glad that I've learned about it.
Very true. I don't know if there's any good writing about it, but I think I experienced something similar to you. I call it my honeymoon phase.
I've had anxiety and depression issues all my life. When I started practicing mindfulness & meditation, I got amazing results. Of course I thought all my problems were over. Of course they were not.
I've learned that my problems, my suffering, will never go away. I may experience a reprieve now and then, but that's not the goal. The goal is to relate to the feelings differently. Attachment to the good feelings meditation can bring, is still attachment any way you slice it.
Ajahn Brahm says there's no such thing as a "bad" meditation because the so-called "bad" meditations are where we are building up the causes for the so-called "good" meditations. He uses the simile of a person who must work in order to get paid. No work; no payday.
How are you defining "good feelings?"
My bad for not being precise in my response. When talking about my anxiety, I really think it will always be with me. Perhaps in time, it won't cause me as much suffering as it has in the past, but I do know that meditating and living mindfully does not get rid of it completely, for me at least.
By 'good feelings' I mean pleasant sensations versus unpleasant, whether they be mental or physical. You'll never be free of those, no matter what happens. The way I understand it, you could be enlightened and if someone punches you in the face, it will still cause you many unpleasant sensations. But it's how you relate to them that is the key.
I am sure tho that grasping for the pleasant sensations that meditation sometimes brings is going to lead to disappointment down the road when you don't have those feelings after a session. Or even yearning for those feelings when you're not meditating. That might not be the worst suffering or attachment, but it's still suffering and attachment.
On a related note, I used to practice yoga for the nice way it made my body feel. Sometimes I wouldn't have a 'good' practice and walk away a little disenchanted. Now I just try to be mindful of how each pose makes me feel. That also helps me not to get competitive.
Of course, 'try' is the key word in all of this...
I think that's a pretty good outlook, since it's very similar to mine
You could be having the shittiest time of your life and that wouldn't be mindfulness, but it would be what you were mindful of.
Mindfulness isn't about pleasure and pain. It is about 'awake'.
Don't become attached and dwell on experiences and feelings. Just let them go and keep practising.
.
Pema Chodron stated in a meditation tape I have that the purpose of mindfulness meditation is not to feel good. She went on to say that we would be happy to know that it is also not the purpose to feel bad.
You can kind of think of this as karma ripening. Some good karma is ripening for you. But you need to practice with it skillfully or else you could turn good into bad. Likewise when bad karma ripens you try to turn bad into good. By not letting it derail you.
Equanimity is what you need. A sense of 'no big deal'. That is what pema chodron says is our everyday experience of emptiness. 'no big deal'.
Pretend you had to walk a mile with a pebble in your shoe; you can take two approaches (lets pretend you can't take off your shoe). The default one is to fixate on the pebble and trying to keep it in a loose part of your shoe so you don't step on it. Inevitably, you will step on it, and it will feel agonizing (which it's not) and frustrating (which it is) and you'll redouble your efforts to avoid it again. If, however, you just accept that the pebble is there, and each time your foot lands on it observe the feeling, and try to feel all the subtleties of it, it doesn't end up hurting that much really. And after a while it just becomes part of the experience. It's actually fairly easy to practice this when it's cold out. If you 'attend' to the feelings of cold, and don't freak out about them, you can handle them a lot more effectively.
The person who uses the first approach and agonizes about the pebble suffers a lot more than the one that accepts the feeling of discomfort (being sensitive to it/opening to the feeling). It's like the chronic pain approach you wrote about earlier - you suffer a lot less when you don't agonize about the pain itself, right?
When we see that the struggle and not the pain is the problem that changes things around. We stop thinking that we are not good and need to get better. We see that we are already good even with our pains.
I like this post. Idk why but I thought it gave a good, albeit not that long, explanation. Don't think of things in terms of good and bad, but rather just what is.
Wow! That would somewhat similar to what my shrink tells me: that what we would call arisings of pain in situations that resemble past pain are to be endured, that I won't ever be insusceptible to having that happen.
It's a daunting reality, but also a liberating one. 'Now' is much less painful than yesterday or tomorrow. And the good news is, yesterday and tomorrow never come. It's always Now.
what of the 3rd noble truth, then? and the 4th. what is the point of the noble eightfold path if you're guaranteed to always suffer.
Now if only I knew what happened after he died...