We must find a way to replace yearning for what life has withheld from us with gratitude for what we have been given.
Kent Nerburn
A balance
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.
Possibilities
Transformation not only shifts how you view the world, but also how you relate to the world. In every situation, ask yourself, ‘Am I being an actor or a victim? Am I valuing or devaluing? Am I focused on me or on us?’ As humans, we are meaning-making creatures. We can create any meaning we want. Why not create a life-enhancing set of possibilities, rather than an endless refrain of victimization and suffering? Manifesting your transformation in the world is what makes it substantial.
Marilyn Schlitz, Social anthropologist, researcher and writer,
Sunday quote: Always changing
You begin to see that there are seasons in your life, in the same way as there as seasons in nature.
They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear,
but messages of how things are.
Chogram Trungpa Rinpoche, How to Rule
Ebb and flow
When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible- in life as in love – is in growth, in fluidity… in freedom.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1906 – 2001, American author and aviator, Gift from the Sea
Change and letting go
Practice often entails confronting the unpalatable until one’s reactions have cooled; then by holding the attention steady it becomes clear that ‘things’ are actually only ‘the way things appear,’ an appearance compounded by reactions and assumptions, reinforced by the resistance to change and letting go.
Ajahn Sucitto
Not frozen solid
By weaving our opinions, prejudices, strategies and emotions into a solid reality, we try to make a big deal out of ourselves, out of our pain, out of our problems. But things are not as solid, predictable or seamless as they seem.
We habitually string our thoughts together into a story that tricks us into believing that our identity, our happiness, our pain and our problems are all solid and separate entities. In fact, like our thoughts all these constructs are constantly changing.
Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty
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