True mastery can be gained
by letting things go their own way.
Byron Katie, Stephen Mitchell, A Thousand Names For Joy: How To Live In Harmony With The Way Things Are
Sunday Quote: In charge
Author: Karl Duffy
This is a Mindfulness Practice Blog written in Laois, Ireland, containing reflections on meditation practice, psychological growth, spirituality and wellness which hopefully may encourage and benefit others as they reflect on their lives and seek to develop a more balanced, mindful and conscious approach to it.
Aliveness
a new month begins…
imagine! imagine!
The wild and wondrous journeys
still to be ours
Mary Oliver, Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me [extract]
Grounded
A lovely image of the solid ground we strive for:
By effort and conscious awareness [Apramāda],
discipline and self-mastery,
a wise person makes for themselves
an island which no flood can overwhelm.
The Dhammapada, 2.25
All will be well
One of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite teachers: “Most things do not matter very much. The rest do not matter at all!” (Stylianos Ateshlis, aka Daskolos). I read it not cynically, but in the form of a statement not to worry so much over this and that. There is a bigger picture, and, I imagine it to be one in which all is well, and all will be well.
Right within each and every one of us the whole creation is thrumming freshly formed and alive. Enjoy that!
Gil Hedley, founder of the Somanautics Workshop approach to the body. [from the Alive on All Channels blog]
The only ground
You are so knitted into a day. You are within it; the day is as close as your skin. It is around your eyes; it is inside your mind. The day moves you, often it can weigh you down; or again it can raise you up. Yet the amazing fact is: this day vanishes. When you look behind you, you do not see your past standing there in a series of day shapes. You cannot wander back through the gallery of your past. Your days have disappeared silently and for ever. Your future time has not arrived yet. The only ground of time is the present moment.
John O’Donohue, Anam Cara
How naïve.
A wooden spoon for stirring jam,
Dripping sweet tar, while in the pan
Plum magma’s bubbles blather.
For someone who can’t grasp the whole
There’s salvation in the remembered detail.
What, back then, did I know about that?
The real, hard as a diamond,
Was to happen in the indefinable
Future, and everything seemed
Only a sign of what was to come. How naïve.
Now I know inattention is an unforgivable sin
And each particle of time has an ultimate dimension.
Janisz Szuber, 1947 – 2020, Polish Poet, About a Boy Stirring Jam
Mindfulbalance 