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.

Inhabiting Vulnerability

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The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant, and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

David Whyte

Saying No

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Although it seems like a contradiction, saying no is actually an act of compassion for others, because when we do things that aren’t appropriate or we’re just too damn tired to fully participate in, they only get a piece of us — a small, crabby piece, if you are anything like me. And it shows compassion for ourselves, a reminder that we’re just as precious as everyone else and sometimes we need to be nurtured as well.

Geri Larkin, Tap Dancing in Zen

This moment is enough

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Contentment doesn’t mean we are always happy about life events or deny the reality of pain. We cultivate contentment by cultivating the inner witness who is able to respond to life from a place of calmness, peace, and tranquility. It means we honor that what is given to us in any moment is enough. So it is the ‘still heart’ — the heart of equanimity — that can welcome everything in. Instead of always living with a sense of dissatisfaction about our lives, or anticipation over what comes next, we live in the knowledge that this moment contains everything we need to be at peace, to experience freedom, to develop compassion for ourselves and others. 

Christine Valters Paintner, Lectio Divina: The Sacred Art

Magnificence in every moment

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When you become enlightened it can come about through a very small or ordinary thing. You see, the most difficult thing for someone to accept is the plainness of their life. To discover magnificence in every moment of a simple life is truly life’s greatest reward.

Hua-Ching Ni, Entering the Tao

Sunday Quote: The right moment

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One of the early Fathers said that ‘there is no such thing as delay with the Holy Spirit.’

This means that everything happens at the right moment.

Laurence Freeman, Common Ground: Letters to a World Community of Meditators

The one assumption

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 Life doesn’t match our image of how it should be, and we conclude that life itself is wrong. We relate to everything from the narrow, fearful perspective of ‘I want’ — and what we want is to feel good. When our emotional distress does not feel good, we recoil from it. The resulting discomfort generates fear, then fear creates even more distress, and distress becomes our enemy, something to be rid of. Let us instead examine our basic requirement that life should be comfortable. This one assumption causes all of our endless difficulties.

Ezra Bayda, Saying Yes to Life ( Even the Hard Parts)