Month: July 2012

Noticing the extraordinary in the ordinary

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and

seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves.

Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte, Everything is waiting for you

Space is always available to us

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Usually when we’re all caught up, we’re so engrossed in our storyline that we lose our perspective. The painful situation at home, in our job, in prison, in war, wherever we might find ourselves – when we’re caught in the difficulty, our perspective usually becomes very narrow, microscopic even. We have the habit of automatically going inward. Taking a moment to look at the sky or taking a few seconds to abide with the fluid energy of life, can give us a bigger perspective – that the universe is vast, that we are a tiny dot in space, that endless, beginningless space is always available to us. Then we might understand that our predicament is just a moment in time, and that we have a choice to strengthen old habitual responses or to be free. Being open and receptive to whatever is happening is always more important than getting worked up and adding further aggression to the planet, adding further pollution to the atmosphere.

Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap

Models of success

Karl Duffy5 Comments

A “successful” life has become a violent enterprise.  We make war on our own bodies, pushing them beyond their limits; war on our children, because we cannot find enough time to be with them when they are hurt and afraid, and need our company; war on our spirit, because we are too preoccupied to listen to the quiet voices that seek to nourish and refresh us; war on our communities, because we are fearfully protecting what we have, and do not feel safe enough to be kind and generous; war on the earth, because we cannot take the time to place our feet on the ground and allow it to feed us, to taste its blessings and give thanks.

The more our life speeds up, the more we feel weary, overwhelmed and lost. Despite our good hearts and equally good intentions, our life and work rarely feel light, pleasant or healing. Instead, as it all piles endlessly upon itself, the whole experience of being alive begins to melt into one enormous obligation. It becomes the standard greeting everywhere: “I am so busy.” We say this to one another with no small degree of pride, as if our exhaustion were a trophy, our ability to withstand stress a mark of real character. The busier we are, the more important we seem to ourselves and, we imagine, to others. To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know that the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single mindful breath — this has become the model of a successful life.

Wayne Miller,  Sabbath

When busy, just take time to stop and notice

Karl Duffy1 Comment

car_breakdown.jpgIn your life just take time to stop, just this sense of stopping and opening when you find yourself in that moment – “Oh I’m caught up, this thing, the next thing and the next thing” …… Just say to yourself  “STOP” and relax and open – try to listen to the sound of silence.

And even if you can’t notice it,  just that stopping just being caught in that momentum of busyness of compulsion…one thing to the next and one thought to the other –  it’s a dualistic world, a conditioned world that we bind ourselves in – going from one thing to the other, until we get tired and go to bed – we get up and again we do this and we do that, running around one thing after the other…. Now,  that is going from one condition to another…we get caught up in our own particular conditioning and programming – worry worry worry – meeting the deadline. It is always like this – this sense of feeling that there’s always something else, something I have to do, something that needs to be done!

So then the stopping and reflecting,  just stopping and being the KNOWER of this feeling – not trying to suppress it but just recognise that  compulsive momentum….. “its like THIS” …this feeling of rushing…of going onto the next thing – meeting the deadline, so much to do, so much pressure, its like THIS.  Now staying with that, even for a moment is better than not doing it at all – not just being a helpless victim of compulsive habits, until you burn out and break down. It’s like running a motor car until it just breaks down, not reading the signs. This is your life – don’t be intimidated by it or just become a victim of habits.

Ajahn Sumedho

We are not our moods…

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Mindfulness practice, as it deepens, is a practical way of relating to thoughts, of working with difficult emotions – especially as they present in body sensations – and finally, and maybe most crucially,  a way of relating to our sense of self.  One way this may be helpful, in a pragmatic way of dealing with the up’s and down’s of each day,  is to continually  define ourselves in a fluid, on-going,  non-fixed sense, understanding life, as it were, as always being born in each moment. We try to bring attention to these continual little births, seeing how an event or moment gives birth to a new emotion and is followed by a new thought (or more likely, a re-hashing of familiar, old patterns of thought).  Rather than allowing that  thought take hold, identifying with it and making it part of our story, we can let it pass through. Rather than attaching some of our  identity to these moments, and the narrative that accompanies them , we can hold ourselves lightly, not limiting ourselves to the moods we experience or the judgmental thoughts they generate. In this way we can develop a sense of ease as we no longer feel the need to defend the “self” created by them.

Once we are able to perceive that there is change only, and that we ourselves are part of the change, there is no longer anything to possess, no me to possess, no such things as possession. Moreover, I can understand that the impulses that torment me have no more solidity and fixity than any other event. If anger, for instance, were to possess any independent, real existence, then I would be faced with a great problem, for it would existing me apart from other internal or external causes, a  constant personality defect with which I would have to cope. However, since anger is a momentary state arising from conditions and then subsiding because of other conditions, when it is gone, it is really gone, extinct. I am thus not intrinsically an angry person, nor a good person, or any other kind of person.

Francis Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism

Seeing the freshness in each moment

Karl Duffy1 Comment

How we relate to the dynamic flow of energy is important. We can learn to relax with it, recognizing it as our basic ground, as a natural part of life; Or the feeling of uncertainty, of nothing to hold on to, can cause us to panic, and instantly a chain reaction begins. Our energy and the energy of the universe are always in flux, but we have little tolerance for this unpredictability, and we have little ability to see ourselves and  the world as an exciting, fluid situation that is always fresh and new. Instead we get stuck in a rut – the rut of “I want” and “I don’t want,” . . . the rut of continually getting hooked by our personal preferences.

Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap