#721 Innate Capacity "Bigger" than Thinking

     "Basically, when we are talking about mindfulness, we are talking about awareness - pure awareness. It is an innate human capacity that is different from thinking but wholly complementary to it. It is also "bigger" than thinking, because any thought, no matter how momentous or profound, illuminating or destructive, can be held in awareness, and thus looked at, known, and understood in a multiplicity of ways which may provide new degrees of insight and fresh perspectives for dealing with old problems and emergent challenges, whether individual, societal, or global. Awareness in its purest form, or mindfulness, thus has the potential to add value and new degrees of freedom to living life fully and wisely and, thus, to making wiser and healthier, more compassionate and altruistic choices - in the only moment that any of us ever has for tapping our deep interior resources for imagination and creativity, for learning, growing, and healing, and in the end, for transformation, going beyond the limitations of our presently understood models of who we are as human beings and individual citizens, as communities and societies, as nations, and as a species."
       Jon Kabat-Zinn PhD, Mindful Nation UK

Anna Syperek - "Buddy’s Point"  fogforestgallery.ca

#696 Freedom

     “We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master. Taking inward distance, we thus become the authors of our own dramas rather than characters in them.”

        Huston Smith, Jeffery Paine. “Tales of Wonder. Adventures Chasing the Divine. An Autobiography.” HarperOne, NY, 2009.

#653 Awareness Leads to Spaciousness & Freedom

     “Change will happen naturally as we open to the truth. The more we bring our attachments into awareness, the freer we become, not because we eliminate the attachments, but because we learn to identify more with awareness than with desire. Using our capacity for consciousness, we can change perspective on ourselves, giving a sense of space where once there was only habit. Discipline means restraining the habitual movement of the mind, so that instead of blind impulse there can be clear comprehension. 
     In our quest to understand where our unsatisfactoriness derives from, we are often inclined to search for causes and people to blame. … the search for causes has to lead eventually back to the individual. Although traumatic and terrible things may have occurred, it is the individual’s mind that perpetuates the suffering, and that can be trained to change. As long as we are struggling against the feeling, hoping to eliminate it by getting high or being cured, we are still attached. We can relieve unsatisfactoriness only by sharpening our focus and changing our perspective.”

        Epstein M. "Going on Being. Buddhism and the way of Change. A Positive Psychology for the West." Broadway Books, NY, 2001. 

Rutger Bus   www.dpreview.com

#547 Where Am I Now?

     As we gradually mature as human beings, we become increasingly aware of where we are - moment-by-moment - in two major dimensions, AND progressively, intentionally shift from the former to the more conscious, evolved latter:

          • am I pretending that I & everything else will last forever OR consciously aware that everything is in a constant state of change & flux?

          • am I being selfish OR appropriately nurturing our People, our Creatures, our Home?

       Mindfulness training promotes the above fundamental shift to a more evolved "operating system".

Perspective

#523 Benefits of Mindfulness

     "One of the greatest benefits of a powerful faculty of attention is that it gives us the ability to successfully cultivate other positive qualities. With the powerful tool of focused attention, we can uproot formerly intractable bad habits, such as addictive behaviors or harmful thoughts and emotions. We can use it to develop an openhearted stance toward others and, on that basis, experience profound insights into the nature of the mind and of reality, radically altering our relation to the rest of the world."

       B. Alan Wallace. "The Attention Revolution. Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind." Wisdom, Boston, 2006.
       See also: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2012/06/sadness-and-lostness-as-mood.html 

Tiplea Remus, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

#374 Unbinding from "Our" Thoughts and Emotions

     Gradually, with ongoing mindfulness practice, we come to see clearly, directly experiencing, that like all other phenomena, thoughts & emotions arise, abide for a while, then cease. We become increasingly stabilized in observing the impermanent, evanescent nature of all phenomena, that are like birds that suddenly appear in the backyard, land, chirp a few times, then fly away. This includes "our" thoughts & emotions - just transient guests to observe in flight - not to be taken seriously, nor to identify with - these are not who or what we are - not 'I', 'me' or 'mine'.
     This gradual shift in perspective is tremendously freeing, a huge weight off our backs.

     "Can you imagine the possibility of having anxiety and not being anxious about it? Or having depression & not being depressed about it? In other words, can you imaging feeling discomfort without trying to get rid of it? The question is, how do we learn to live in this way? There is no easy answer, but the key is to learn how to welcome – with curiosity – whatever our life is in each moment.”            E. Bayda

Tyne   www.dpreview.com