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.

Being still

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When we dare to be still and let the feelings come, even if we fear they will pounce on us like panthers, we find something surprising.   Karma means movement, and sometimes it’s easy to see that we are almost always in movement – almost always moving away from what is, always planning, improving, even trying to make what is stay.   When we dare to be still, we stop our karma. What does this mean? It means we aren’t sentenced to live out the same old thoughts and fears. We discover that there is a force of love and compassion comes with feeling the pain we fear in the same way a hand flies up to cradle a bumped head. And we discover that things are not as we fear, that we are not alone, that awareness and stillness and compassion are not just a words but forces, that we are held.

Tracy Cochran, What Can Happen When We’re Still

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Not beyond this moment

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Our lives are not beyond this breath there on the chilly glass, but of that breath

and in this life the hands in our mittens are never really empty.

It is all around us, free, this wonderful life: clear jingle of tire chains, the laughter of ice that breaks under our boots. Each hour is a gift to those who take it up.

Ted Kooser, American Pulitzer Prize winning Poet, December

everything belongs

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One point that Ajahn Sumedho would stress regularly, is that loving things is not the same as liking them. Having kindness for ourselves or for other beings is not the same as liking everything.

We often come a cropper by trying to make ourselves like everything. This is a completely wrong approach. When we taste something that’s bitter and try to force ourselves to believe it’s sweet this is just falsity, it’s just sugaring things over. It doesn’t work. It just makes the bitter even worse….We’re not trying to like everything, rather we’re recognising that everything belongs. Everything is part of nature: the bitter as well as the sweet, the beautiful as well as the ugly, the cruel as well as the kindly. The heart that recognises that fundamentally everything belongs is what I would describe as being the heart of kindness, the essence of kindness.

Ajahn Amaro, Radical Acceptance

To be yourself

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To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t
need to be accepted by others. You need to
accept yourself.

When you are born a lotus
flower, be a beautiful lotus flower, don’t try to be
a magnolia flower. If you crave acceptance and
recognition and try to change yourself to fit what
other people want you to be, you will suffer all
your life.

True happiness and true power lie in
understanding yourself, accepting yourself,
having confidence in yourself.

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Power

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Quiet

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If you could only keep quiet,

– clear of memories and expectations –

you would be able to discern the beautiful pattern of events.

It is your restlessness that causes chaos.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, 1897 – 1981, Indian non dualist teacher

Sunday Quote: Going slow

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The season of Advent commences: a period for waiting, for simplifying things and for seeing what is important. To have space for what has not yet come, we need to notice what gets in the way of being still and open.

In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow.

In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.

And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.

Pico Iyer. The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere