The Power of Awareness and Attention May 4, 2010
Posted by bodhidude in : Spirituality , 2comments
In the last couple of years I’ve moved around a great deal living in half a dozen living situations. In the process I’ve been looking at how I create security, stability and a feeling a safety in my life. During this time I had very few of the usual things most people associate with security and stability, things like a house, a car, a job, a long term relationship or money. I’ve had all of these things in the past but in my process of transformation had to temporarily let them go one by one. My intention in letting them go for a while was not because they are negative or problematic but rather to look at my attachment to them and my motivations in having them in my life. You see, all of these so called sources of security have also been sources of suffering for me. They have caused suffering because they are unreliable, temporary and fail to meet my expectations. One thing we can say for certain about external sources of security is that they are temporary, they do not last forever and they change, often in ways we don’t like.
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Dropping our story September 16, 2009
Posted by bodhidude in : Healing, Psychology, Spirituality, articles , 2comments
Meditation has been one of the most powerful healing techniques that I’ve ever encountered and I’ve used it extensively on my own path as well as regularly offering it to those I work with. The power behind it lies in its ability to help one touch the core of their being, their inner most nature which from my perspective is limitless in every way, this includes limitless joy, abundance, power, love, healing and compassion. Meditation and mindfulness practice also help to break through the mental stories that we overlay on so many of our experiences and bring us back in contact with raw feeling and experience.
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Meditation: Finding freedom in the present June 14, 2009
Posted by bodhidude in : Healing, Psychology, Spirituality, Transformation, articles , 2comments
There are two things about life that never cease to amaze me, one is how painful it can be and the other is how simple and beautiful it can be. When things are going well it is very easy to grab onto that experience and expect life to remain good and comfortable but inevitably it changes and we experience pain and difficultly which we tend to want to avoid or push away. You could say that this process of attachment and aversion is one of the main causes of suffering and dissatisfaction in life because we can’t hold onto the good stuff and we can’t avoid the painful, the one constant in this is change. Often we are not aware of the way we hold onto or push away parts of our life. We can pretty much count on almost everything being temporary and this is just a reality of life which doesn’t need to be a problem, but when attachment and aversion arise it quickly becomes problematic.
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Allowing what is May 12, 2009
Posted by bodhidude in : Spirituality, articles , 1 comment so far
Since my intense experience at a Zen retreat a couple of weeks ago my spiritual practice (or really my life) has begun to shift significantly and it is shifting in the direction of simplicity. What I reacted to at the retreat was the degree of structure and technique. Zen practice is itself a very simple form of spiritual practice in one sense but it involves a great deal of form, procedure and technique in another sense. In sitting with my post retreat experience while I understand the purpose of that I am finding myself drawn to the utter simplicity of presence without the technique and form. I find that I can actually use meditation techniques to try and control my meditation experience, “trying” to do it right or achieve something which takes me into another mind story.
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