Tag Archives: Stories
What is the essence of true relationship?
Eckhart Tolle describes true relationship in this way: “Meeting them without past. Not meeting the other person as a walking personal history.” Meeting each person in the moment, free from conditioned thought about “who” that person is because of “what” they did in the past. This kind of emotional profit and loss statement is relationship [...]
The Water Bottle
Last night, before I got into bed, I was distractedly wandering around the house getting everything ready for bed. I must have wandered in and out of the lounge room three times, each time forgetting something I needed and on the second last trip, going in to get my water bottle (one of those re-usable [...]
Mindfulness Plain and Simple: Chapter 1
The following is an excerpt from the soon to be released “Mindfulness Plain and Simple”, By Oli Doyle. Feedback and comments welcome…
The human world is filled with pain, confusion and suffering on an individual and collective level to the point where it almost seems normal, even inevitable. Humans become more miserable as a species every [...]
Climate Change and Mindfulness
What is the role of spiritual practice in meeting the challenge of climate change? This is a question I wanted to explore, as many people have the incorrect assumption that an acceptance-based spiritual practice implies doing nothing to effect social change. This is not the case.
Mindfulness is a practice of accepting the moment as it [...]
Acceptance
At the one day workshop on Sunday, we were discussing the practice of acceptance, and how it fits into mindfulness practice. Acceptance means learning to see things as they are, instead of viewing them through our preconceived ideas and thoughts. So when we practice mindfulness of emotions, we sit with emotions and explore them curiously, [...]
Unconditional Happiness
In this article, we will look at what I call “Conditional Happiness” and the role it plays in the suffering experienced by human beings. I will also examine what I call “the structure of suffering”, that is, how we create our own suffering in the first place. These ideas may seem radical or unbelievable and [...]
The essence of Mindfulness
Usually when we think of life, we think of “my life” which is basically a story that we must keep telling ourselves in order to keep it alive. If you watch the story or listen closely to yourself telling it over and over, you will get bored of it. “My life” will become dull and uninteresting. We must continue to create drama, find problems to solve and change things in order to have something to talk and think about. Without this, we feel great emptiness, we feel as if “life is passing me by”.
The Stories of our lives
Every day in every person’s mind, thousands of stories are generated. As we walk through the world, the mind interprets, projects and tries to make meaning, tries to understand why things happen. We believe that everything happens for a reason. And we also believe that by knowing the reason, we will have more control over our circumstances, but that’s another story.
