Month: April 2013

Noticing the “buts”

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When the mind is coloured by a dualistic perspective, every experience – even moments of joy and happiness – is bounded by some sense of limitation. There is always a but lurking in the background. One kind of but is the but of difference: “Oh my birthday cake was wonderful but I would have liked chocolate cake instead of carrot cake”. Then there is the but of “better”: “I love my new house,  but my friend John’s place is bigger and has much better light”. And finally there is the but of fear: “I can’t stand my job, but in this market how will I ever find another one”…I’ve begun to recognize..that feelings of limitation, anxiety fear and so on are just so much neuronal gossip. They are in essence, habits. And habits can be unlearned.

Yongey Mingpur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living

The Uncomplicated moment

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cherry_blossom

Mindfulness, seeing clearly, means awakening to the happiness of the uncomplicated moment. We complicate moments. Hardly anything happens without the mind spinning it up into an elaborate production. It’s the elaboration that makes life more difficult than it needs to be.

Sylvia Boorstein

Sweeping out clutter

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path

But it’s not so simple, this sort of “quiet hour” : it has to be learnt. A lot of unimportant inner litter and bits and pieces have to be swept out first. Even a small head can be piled high inside with irrelevant distractions. True, there may be edifying emotions and thoughts, too, but the clutter is ever-present. So let this be the aim of the meditation: to turn ones innermost being into a vast empty plain, with none of that treacherous undergrowth to impede the view so that something of “God” can enter you, and something of “Love” too.

Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life

Sunday Quote: Colour

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ladybird 130413

There is not one little blade of grass,

there is no colour in this world

that is not intended to make men rejoice.

John Calvin

Balance, rooted in the body

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Healing is a natural  result of finding true balance.

If we relate to a balanced ease in the body, it brings us into the balance of our minds, and it is only from that basis that we can get a feel, through the tangle of anxieties and mood swings, of a simple thread of emotional ease and psychological space. It’s a shift from being tense or on guard, to something more trusting. And it’s through attending to this that we can step back from the biases and old narratives.

Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma

An unobserved life

Karl Duffy3 Comments

cowslips

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

Eric Hoffer, American moral and social philosopher.