Month: March 2020

Keeping the heart open

Karl Duffy2 Comments

It is not easy to keep the heart open in moments of fear and anxiety

The covenant of life is not just to stay alive, but to stay in our aliveness. And staying in aliveness depends on opening the heart and keeping it open. Our dreams, goals, and ambitions are all kindling, fuel for the heart to exercise its aliveness, to bring our gift into the world, to discover what matters.

We drift in and out of knowing our aliveness. Pain, worry, fear, and loss can muffle and confuse us. But finding our gift and working it will bring us back alive. It doesn’t matter if we’re skillful or clumsy, if we play our gift well or awkwardly, or if we make great strides or fail. Aliveness is not a judge in a talent show. Aliveness shows itself in response to wholeheartedness, when we can say yes to life, and work with what we’re given, and stay in relationship – to everything.

Mark Nepo, The One Life We’re Given: Finding the Wisdom That Waits in Your Heart

Seeing what we stand on

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Some words from poet David Whyte in these anxious times

GROUND is what lies beneath our feet. It is the place where we already stand; a state of recognition, the place or the circumstances to which we belong whether we wish to or not. It is what holds and supports us, but also what we do not want to be true; it is what challenges us, physically or psychologically, irrespective of our hoped-for needs. It is the living, underlying foundation that tells us what we are, where we are, what season we are in and what, no matter what we wish in the abstract, is about to happen in our body; in the world or in the conversation between the two.

To come to ground is to find a home in circumstances and in the very physical body we inhabit in the midst of those circumstances and above all to face the truth, no matter how difficult that truth may be; to come to ground is to begin the courageous conversation, to step into difficulty and by taking that first step, begin the movement through all difficulties, to find the support and foundation that has been beneath our feet all along: a place to step onto, a place on which to stand and a place from which to step.  

from Consolations:  The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

I don’t think any of us can quite understand the ground on to which we are now settling, due to to the effects of the Coronavirus on our world-wide societies and economies. … This will be a test and a re-ordering, not only of our health and our political and financial systems, but of of our mutual compassion, our willingness to work together and even more perhaps, our willingness to fundamentally change our societies to a more equatable sharing of both rewards and well-being.

from his Facebook page, March 11th 

A Blessing for this day

Karl Duffy3 Comments

An unusual St Patrick’s Day when people are fearful, and gatherings are not allowed, in church or in the pub. We need to find resources and blessings within and then extend those blessings to all who are afraid and especially those most vulnerable at this time. 

When the canvas frays in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow wind work these words
of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life.

John O’Donohue, Beannacht

Beannachtai na Féile Padraig oraibh go léir: The blessings of  Saint Patrick’s Day to you all.

Working with our anxieties

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We can never solve our lives. Life is not a thing that can be broken and then fixed. Life is a process, and we can never solve a process. We can only participate in this process, either consciously or unconsciously. We aren’t going to find the perfect formula and then coast our way through life. We can’t make pain go away, although we can reduce unnecessary suffering significantly. The more deeply we investigate, the less we can grasp or even know this apparent self that Western psychology takes as its foundation. From the Buddhist perspective, the nature of life — and of our own mind — is basically open. There is no foundation; no ground to stand on. We can consciously participate in this open nature, but we can’t know it.

Bruce Tift, How to Work with Anxiety on the Path of Liberation

Sunday Quote: Feeding

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We have a choice these days: to feed our fear – and there is a lot being spread on social media – or to drop the mind into moments of rest…

When we meditate, we are training the mind

to stop feeding a pain pattern

Ruth King, author and Meditation teacher, Soothing the Hot Coals of Rage

Noticing our inner critic

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What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us
And urge us on to futile activity
And in the end, judge us still more severely
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us.

T. S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman