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.

Our holy places

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

One positive aspect of the lockdown, and what is allowed, is the extra time spent walking in nature. (I am not sure that his interpretation is, strictly speaking,  etymologically correct, but it predates him by some centuries and is a nice idea)

Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, “A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently.

John Muir, 1838 – 1914

Let go and Rest

Karl Duffy1 Comment
There is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied… But I can’t go out and try to see this way. I’ll fail, I’ll go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble…The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West… The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally  that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow  of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed,  and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. 
Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded  in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights;  you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence  without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real  where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

liberating

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Remember that we are learning to pay attention without self-judgment or discursive analysis. You might say that we are “rolling out the red carpet,” welcoming — beyond liking or disliking — whatever enters the field of the heart. Offering ourselves such close and caring attention is itself liberating.

Saki Santorelli, Heal Thy Self

The harmony of things

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Once you know that there is something other than what you have bitten into most of the time, your choices take on a new kind of karmic significance… This process slowly tunes you back into the harmony of things. It’s like, if you’re driving to school and you are in a hurry and the traffic becomes a terrible opposition to you, you struggle to move faster and faster. But you could take a breath and say, ‘Well, I’m in traffic; when I get to school, I’ll get to school; I am doing the best that I can, but it is also about this moment.’ You open yourself up to the flow and accept that there is a certain rate at which the traffic moves.  

Ram Dass

Everything is workable

Karl Duffy1 Comment

For the witness, everything is workable. Nothing needs to be pushed away. To the contrary: our seemingly most intractable neuroses become the doorway into full life. What emerges when we open this door is a happiness that is not the opposite of sadness, a self-love that is not the opposite of self-hate. It is, rather, a happiness that embraces sadness, and a love that embraces hate. Witness consciousness cultivates a place behind dark and light, behind good and evil — behind even personality, behind even the mind. . . .

“As Rumi says, ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. Meet me there.

Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

Sunday Quote: Our fears

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Failure seldom stops you;

what stops you is the fear of failure

Jack Lemmon