Year: 2013

Not getting in the way

Karl Duffy1 Comment

awake2Just like the question “Can you see your own eyes?” Nobody can see their own eyes. I can see your eyes but I can’t see my eyes. I’m sitting right here, I’ve got two eyes and I can’t see them. But you can see my eyes. But there’s no need for me to see my eyes because I can see! It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? If I started saying “Why can’t I see my own eyes?” you’d think “Ajahn Sumedho’s really weird, isn’t he!” Looking in a mirror you can see a reflection, but that’s not your eyes, it’s a reflection of your eyes. There’s no way that I’ve been able to look and see my own eyes, but then it’s not necessary to see your own eyes. It’s not necessary to know who it is that knows — because there’s knowing.

Ajahn Sumedho

Sometimes waiting is good

Karl Duffy2 Comments

 

Many people believe that emptiness is a lifeless void of nothingness that leads to emotional or mental paralysis.

However, emptiness, when timed correctly in the healing process, leads to freedom…

It serves as the space of transition…

Donald Epstein, The 12 Stages of Healing

Resting our mind

Karl Duffy1 Comment

474676v1Mindfulness involves resting our mind in a place where there is no anxiety, no fear. In fact, in that place we find the opposite. We find resourcefulness, courage, and a quiet happening. Where is that “place”? It is not a geographical location. It is not a location in time. It is the flowing time and place of the present moment. Anxiety is fuelled by thoughts of past and future. When we drop those thoughts, we drop anxiety and find ourselves at ease.

Jan Chozen Bays, How to Train a Wild Elephant

The challenge of the Journey

Karl Duffy2 Comments
File:Path.JPGThen you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . .and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.    Exodus 12: 7 & 13

They thought they were safe
that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.

Lynn Ungar, Passover

Sunday Quote: Living fully

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rope_bridge

 

What you can plan

is too small

for you to live.

David Whyte, What to Remember when Waking

Keeping mental energies in awareness

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The heart is just the heart; thoughts and feelings are just thoughts and feelings. Let things be just as they are! Let form be just form, let sound be just sound, let thought be just thought. Why should we bother to attach to them? If we think and feel in this way, then there is detachment and separateness. Our thoughts and feelings will be on one side and our heart will be on the other. Just like oil and water — they are in the same bottle but they are separate.

Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart