March 2017 – Page 5 – Mindfulbalance

Need to get somewhere, be someone

March 7, 2017March 4, 2017 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The psychological self is rooted in time. It needs to feel it is on a journey, that it is getting somewhere — anywhere. The journey is what provides it with a feeling of existence and continuity. If it weren’t going somewhere it would be forced to feel the fear of the present moment, the fear of not existing, of the void beneath its feet. Our individual journey is reinforced by the cultural norm. Our culture is so fixated on the necessity of doing that if we are idle for a while we are very likely to think we are wasting our time and our lives. Everyone wants to “have a life” and “get a life,” and that usually means throwing ourselves into some gainful activity that will show a tangible result.

Roger Housden, Dropping the Struggle

photo: payton chung

The danger of compulsive working

March 6, 2017March 4, 2017 Karl Duffy2 Comments

Western laziness ……consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy. We are so addicted to looking outside ourselves that we have lost access to our inner being almost completely. We are terrified to look inward, because our culture has given us no idea of what we will find. So we make our lives so hectic that we eliminate the slightest risk of looking into ourselves. … in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do.

Sogyal Rinpoche

photo: wusirichard

Sunday Quote: Making space to listen

March 5, 2017March 4, 2017 Karl Duffy1 Comment

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it,

listen for what it intends to do with you

Parker Palmer

photo patrick doheny

Open to good and bad

March 4, 2017March 4, 2017 Karl Duffy3 Comments

A story about Zen master Suzuki Roshi. Once his students had been sitting and they were 3 or 4 hours into a very hard sitting period. The person who told the story said that every bone in his body was hurting. Not only that, his thoughts were totally obsessed with either, “I can’t do this, I’m worthless. There’s something wrong with me.” or “This whole thing is ridiculous. Why did I ever come here? These people are crazy. This place is like boot camp.” Probably everyone else in the room was going through something similar.

Suzuki Roshi came in to give the lecture and sat down. He started to talk very, very slowly and said, “The difficulty that you are experiencing now…” (And that man was thinking….“will go away”)… and Suzuki said, “will be with you for the rest of your life.”

That’s a sort of Buddhist humor, but it is also the essence of maitri (friendliness towards ourselves). It seems to me that we come to a body of teachings or any spiritual path, or to meditation, in some way like little children looking for comfort, looking for understanding, looking for attention, looking somehow to be confirmed. And the truth is actually that the meditation practice isn’t about that. Practice is about that part of our being finally being able to open completely to the whole range of our experience, including all that wanting, including all that hurt, including the pain and the joy. Opening to the whole thing so that this little child-like part of us can finally, finally, finally, finally grow up.

But this issue of growing up, it’s not all that easy because it requires a lot of courage… to relate directly with your experience. By this I mean whatever is occurring in you, you use it. You seize the moment. Moment after moment? You seize those moments and instead of letting life shut you down and make you more afraid, you use those very same moments of time to soften and to open and to become more kind.

Pema Chodron

photo infrogmation of New Orleans

At different times we all need grace

March 3, 2017March 3, 2017 Karl Duffy1 Comment

Sometimes we can feel lost or overwhelmed and we do not have the words to express what is going on. Maybe it is precisely then that the angels or miraculous beings will run to help us

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
To gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Besides ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.

Rumi, Zero Circle

Facing the chaos within

March 2, 2017February 26, 2017 Karl Duffy5 Comments

Even if a person does not observe Lent, the themes are universal and necessary :

Sometimes the etymology of a word can be helpful. Linguistically, lent is derived from an old English word meaning springtime. In Latin, lente means slowly. Etymologically, then, lent points to the coming of spring and it invites us to slow down our lives so as to be able to take stock of ourselves.

Lent has always been understood as a time to metaphorically spend forty days in the desert unprotected by normal nourishment so as to have to face “Satan” and the “wild animals” and see whether the “angels” will indeed come and look after us when we reach that point where we can no longer look after ourselves. For us, “Satan” and “wild animals” refer particularly to the chaos inside of us that normally we either deny or simply refuse to face – our paranoia, our anger, our jealousies, our distance from others, our fantasies, our grandiosity, our addictions, our unresolved hurts…. The normal food that we eat – distracted ordinary life – works to shield us from the deeper chaos that lurks beneath the surface of our lives.

Lent invites us to stop eating whatever protects us from having to face the desert that is inside of us. It invites us to feel our smallness, to feel our vulnerability, to feel our fears, and to open ourselves up the chaos of the desert so that we can finally give the angels a chance to feed us. That’s the ideal of lent, to face one’s chaos.

Ron Rolheiser, Entering Lent

photo: Another believer