Month: April 2013

Kindness towards oneself

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Flickr - The U.S. Army - Soldier returns to Haiti, helps family.jpg

Instead of mercilessly judging and criticizing yourself for various inadequacies or shortcomings, self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with personal failings – after all, who ever said you were supposed to be perfect? You may try to change in ways that allow you to be more healthy and happy, but this is done because you care about yourself, not because you are worthless or unacceptable as you are. Perhaps most importantly, having compassion for yourself means that you honor and accept your humanness.  Things will not always go the way you want them to.  You will encounter frustrations, losses will occur, you will make mistakes, bump up against your limitations, fall short of your ideals.  This is the human condition, a reality shared by all of us. The more you open your heart to this reality instead of constantly fighting against it, the more you will be able to feel compassion for yourself and all your fellow humans in the experience of life.

 Kristin Neff

What you already have within

Karl Duffy5 Comments

focus stained glass

And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

Rilke, Book of Images

Curious about the mind

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File:Curiosity in children.jpg

The path of meditation and the path of our lives altogether has to do with curiosity, inquisitiveness. The ground is ourselves; we’re here to study ourselves and to get to know ourselves now, not later.  One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are. That’s not considered to be a problem; the point is to see it.

Pema Chodron.

photo Vitold Muratov

Being comfortable with non-doing

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The emptiness of the desert makes it possible to learn the almost impossible:

the joyful acceptance of our uselessness. 

Ivan Illich

Starting from where you are

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Coming home

Be gentle with yourself. Be kind to yourself. You may not be perfect, but you are all that you have to work with. The process of becoming who you will be, begins first with the total acceptance of who you are.

Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

Nowhere to go

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https://i0.wp.com/www.goerieblogs.com/sports/nwpaoutdoors/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Marsh-Trail.jpg

What we are seeking is right here. But we persist in looking south to find the north star. Any kind of speculating is just the discursive mind doing its habitual thing – creating scenarios in the mind that block us from discovering what is right in front of us.  This moment is not some narrow, tiny point but is actually everything.  Right now includes memories of the past, fantasies about the future, judgements about the present, emotions and sensations of all kinds.  As soon as we say, “I’m living in the present,”  we’ve made a significant cognitive error, and created another barrier for ourselves.  Meditation practice ….. brings us into the direct intimate experience of this moment.  There’s no room for speculating.  We feel fully alive.  There’s no place to go, and yet, we are continually moving through space and time.  The path is never blocked if we can realize that we are always on it, going in the only direction we can go.  We’re always heading for here, here, here, here.

Melissa Blacker, Trail Temporarily Closed