Mindfulness for Busy People: The Art of Karma Yoga

In the bustling tapestry of modern life, how often do we prioritize our spiritual journey? For many, spirituality is a side pursuit, something to engage in when life is calm and stress-free. However, this approach can hinder meaningful progress. In this article, we'll explore why spirituality needs to be a top priority and how Karma Yoga can help integrate mindfulness into your daily life.

A busy life can be a spiritual life.

Finding Your Original Face: Understanding I-AMness

"Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born." - Zen Koan

How can we understand this Zen koan and find our fundamental I-AMness? The koan is meant to be understood directly rather than metaphorically, which makes it even more challenging. You cannot retreat into your imagination to visualize what it might mean. Nor can you think of an arrow of time going back into the past and imagine what you could have been like without a body. The meaning of the koan is to be found right here in every moment of lived experience. That's what we are going to explore in this post.

Embracing the whole of experience.

Appreciation Transforms The Ordinary Into Perfection

Compared to our not-so-distant past, we are all incredibly wealthy. Imagine for a moment a life without absolutely any possessions. You are out there in nature without any clothes, tools or shelter, left alone to find enough calories and protection from the elements every day of your rather short life. Today we are equipped with a lot more tools, possessions and wealth, yet we are also becoming more depressed than ever before. 

Appreciates having nothing

Developing Equanimity

Equanimity is one of three qualities of mind that we want to develop if spiritual enlightenment is our goal. The other two are focus and clarity. Equanimity as a quality of mind is helpful not only for meditation and insight but also for life satisfaction in general. With equanimity, we remain in a peaceful state regardless of the experiences we have at the moment. When pain arises, we are not swept away by our stories around it and remain aware of the sensations that arise and pass from moment to moment. 

Mind-Self

Today I am. Clarity in not knowing.

I don't know who or what, yet I am. 

Not in me, not in you, not in it. I am nowhere to be found. 

Yet always present. 

Perspectives onto myself. Including the perspective. That I am.

I am perspective, one second real, next second unreal.

How do perspectives exist though? Do I exist?

A perspective from which "I" do not exist, that certainly is true.

A perspective from which "I" do exist, that idea certainly is true.

One second on, and off the next. But who makes the switch?

What is true regardless of ideas? 

What is prior to concepts?

Concepts and ideas come and go, yet I remain. 

Pure potential.

Mind-Self

A Powerful Dream Yoga Technique

If you are practising mindfulness in daily activities, you may have noticed something interesting happening to your sleep. At a certain point, as you develop your mindfulness, the increased awareness will carry over into your dreams and sleep. And even if this has not happened to you yet, you can learn how nighttime practices can benefit your spiritual progress. Dream and Sleep Yoga are powerful meditation techniques that allow you to extend your practice. 

Mindfulness for busy people - Karma Yoga

Is the spiritual path one of the five most important things in your life? For most people, it is not. Spirituality is something they do on the side. When life is quiet and not stressful. In this article, we will explore why it is so difficult to make meaningful progress if spirituality is not one of your top priorities and how you can fix it. 

What It Means To Be Present in Meditation

The purpose of meditation is to internalize awareness and focus on the present moment. What does it mean to be aware of the present moment? In this article, you will learn about the difficulty to distinguish between conceptualization and presence and how you can go about doing it. 

How do you grasp Nothingness?

The Downside Of Wanting To Be Fast

Our whole economy is about efficiency. We want to do things in less time. Everything has to be done as quickly as possible. Time is money. But what is the cost of the thinking that things have to be done faster?

The Moment Is Eternal

Time is generated from within the moment. You always only perceive now. But you can't understand this intellectually. In order to realize this, a great shift in your perception has to take place. How do you do this? By letting go of any concept outside of what actually exists right now.

Bring Joy Into Your Practice

Have you been meditating for a while? Have you settled into a routine and meditate a certain amount of time daily? If this is the case, you may also find that your practice has become a little stale. The meditative practices you apply are always the same and you are not really excited about them anymore. 

In this article, I want to explore how you can bring joy back into your practice and give it a positive quality. This way your practice can become something you look forward to every day.

To Go Beyond Fear Means To Go Through

Do you feel that something is holding you back? Maybe it's subtle, but those are feelings of fear. Why are you not doing what you know you want to do? The only way to overcome fear is to go through it. In this article, we are going to explore just how the dynamics around resolving fears work. 

You are physically safe, and you need a better way to deal with fear.

Reasons You Dislike Meditation

In case you do not have a meditation practice in place yet and dislike the idea of extended periods of regular meditation, this article may help you understand why and how you can fix it. 

Blissful, transformative states can be achieved by meditation.

The Final Frontier

In mindfulness meditation we become aware of the concepts that build up our self-identity. What we have formerly identified with and have unconsciously seen as the subject, is slowly turned into an object in awareness.

The Zen-symbol for the oneness of existence.

We dis-identify with the tendencies of our psyche. Through that process we gain freedom from our worldviews, that shape our behavior and determine how we feel about the world. Just by holding these concepts in our awareness, we become clear of their underlying mechanisms and see through the ego-identification that is there.

In that process we come to a point where we have separated from all mental phenomena and recognize them as not-self. This is also called the neti-neti method. Finally we come to a state where we seemingly have nothing to let go of anymore. At that point we continue to ask the question: what remains?

The last identification that remains is that of the Do-er. We think we are directing our attention. We think that we are the source of our thoughts. That we produce our actions.

This is the final frontier which needs to be investigated.
Finally we might discover, that this deepest of all identifications is also illusory.

Essential Spiritual Practice: Zazen

According to the Shobogenzo, which is the best resource of Zen-Buddhism, the practice of Zazen is the only real practice that is required to achieve the realization of truth. While we are sitting in the clear awareness in an upright position, we are cultivating the qualities of the buddha-mind or no-mind. The practice is simple yet effective. You sit with your legs crossed or with your feet under your butt. In both of these positions the spine stays straight without muscular contraction. These positions become comfortable for extended periods of time after the first few weeks.

Zazen is the only essential spiritual practice.

Then the whole practice is to remain as awareness, which is aware of itself. You could accompany this being aware with the question: "What am I?". This question emphasizes the empty nature of awareness and denies our commonly held believe that we know who we are, when in fact our true self has none of the qualities we attribute to our self.

Sitting in Zazen is therefore an exercise of remaining aware of the nothingness that it is. Over time this will increase our capacity to stay in this clear state of mind and detachment naturally develops. A detachment from the false self which we identify with.

Even though this practice sounds simple, it has many nuances and should be evaluated and discussed regularly with a teacher to avoid the various traps of wrong practice. For example, it is easily possible to do ones daily practice in a state of day-dreaming, where one is almost entirely absorbed in thoughts about ones life. Which actually achieves the opposite of what Zazen practice is about.

To start the practice of Zazen it can be helpful to choose an object in ones experiences to focus on. This will train the ability to concentrate without interruption for extended periods of time. In my own practice I have found constant objects, like sensations to be best to develop this concentration. I start out every meditation practice with about 10 minutes of concentration on the sensation of my hands which lie on top of each other in my lap. This concentration requires effort and silences the mind. When I feel that my concentration has deepened and lengthened, I shift over to concentration on awareness without objects. Remaining aware as awareness of itself, as mentioned in the beginning.

I wish you much success with your own meditation practice. Please feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments, or book a Consultation with me, if you want to discuss your progress in detail.

Why Conscious Exploration Entails Suffering

"The magnitude of the benefits of spiritual and personal development are equal to the suffering it causes."

This is the beauty of personal development. You become free to choose the degree of your happiness. If you are not yet fully present and content with existence, you are not enlightened yet. Than you know you have not yet gone through enough spiritual suffering. The suffering on the spiritual path usually comes up during meditation as distractions in the form of memories of your life.

In meditation you want to still the mind and turn awareness in on itself.

Step by step you are discovering that non of those things were ever actually you. You continuously detach from the identification with the illusory self. That means to dis-identify with what you previously thought was you. That is painful as it can feel like you are step by step dying. But at the end of that process or in an instant you will realize your true self and die into the whole of existence.

That process has an in-flexion point, where the emptiness inside turns into all of existence. A realization will happen where you see that you are in fact larger than the entire universe. But until then, the spiritual journey can feel painful, because it is a process of continually letting go of false believes, which make up who you currently think you are.

How can you enjoy this process of self discovery, if it entails so much suffering? 

Because suffering is the byproduct of discovering your own delusions, that are actually the root cause of your suffering. A deep interest in the truth will over-shine the falling away of attachments to the illusory self. Pulling out the illusions reveals their full depth. It will reveal to you how you are pushed around by their emotional force.

But, because delusion is what the false self is at it's core, discovering those very deep truth is a painful process of self-transformation. The self wants to remain as it is. You right there, you want to maintain the status quo of who you are. Revealing the delusions in yourself is like cutting away parts of yourself, with the intention to discover that you never were those parts to begin with. Or rather that you never were those parts exclusively. Finally you will come to understand that your illusory self is part of the mind of god, which is the unchanging ever present emptiness that you are.