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.

In the face of loss

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It’s natural for us to fall apart in the face of loss. No need to stop it. Often our old coming mechanisms simply don’t work in this new context. However, finding our ground or recalling what has been most meaningful can help us stay present with what we are experiencing. We don’t have adequate language to describe this sort of incomprehensible experience, so we name it Mystery with a capital M.

Over the years, I have found that what we can experience or know directly may be much more important than our ability to explain or measure it.

Frank Ostaseski

Fast food

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Authentic God experience is always “too much”! It consoles our True Self only after it has devastated our false self.

We must begin to be honest about this instead of dishing out fast-food religion, which only wants consolation – and largely about non-essentials.

Richard Rohr, The Container and the Contents

Notions of happiness

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Your notions of happiness may be very dangerous. Happiness can only be possible in the here and now. Go back and examine deeply your notions and ideas of happiness. So let go of what you believed yesterday. Let go of what you thought last week you needed to be happy. The conditions of happiness that are in your life now are enough.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Out of nowhere

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The Diamond Sutra says,

“Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth.”

Working With the Koan : Usually people work hard to make things happen. Yet it might be that things happen by themselves, coming out of nowhere. When you forget your carefully assembled fiction of who you are, you can find a natural delight in people, in the planet, the stones, and the trees. There is no observable limit to this beauty, and no one is excluded from it.

John Tarrant, Bring Me The Rhinoceros and other Zen Koans that will save your life

Not limiting ourselves

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Is it possible to let go of the belief that you should or need to know who you are? In other words, can you cease looking to conceptual definitions to give you a sense of self? Can you cease looking to thought for an identity?

Defining yourself through thoughts is limiting yourself. When you fully accept that you don’t know, you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

Sunday Quote: Holding both truths

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Everyone must have two pockets.

In the right pocket are to be the words: “For my sake was the world created.” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5)

And in the left: “I am but dust and ashes.” (Genesis 18:27)

Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Przysucha in Martin Buber Tales of the Hasidim