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.

Confronting change

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Our lives ask us to die and be reborn every time we confront change – change within ourselves and change in our world. When we descend all the way down to the bottom of a loss, and dwell patiently, with an open heart, in the darkness and pain, we can bring back up with us the sweetness of life and the exhilaration of inner growth. When there is nothing left to lose, we find the true self — the self that is whole, the self that is enough, the self that no longer looks to others for definition, or completion, or anything but companionship on the journey. This is the way to live a meaningful and hopeful life — a life of real happiness and inner peace.

Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open

We make up our life moment by moment

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Some brain-science thoughts giving the same message as yesterday’s meditation one…

Instead of seeing the brain as rigid, fixed in mode, programmed like a computer, there is now a much more biological and powerful notion of “experiential selection,” of experience literally shaping the connectivity and function of the brain.

But how then do our frames, our momentary moments, hold together? How, if there is only transience, do we achieve continuity? Our passing thoughts, as James says ( in an image which smacks of cowboy life in the l880’s) do not wander round like wild cattle. Each one is owned, our own, and bears the brand of this ownership, and each thought, in James’ words, is born an owner of the thoughts that went before, and “dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor.

We come around to Proust’s image, itself slightly reminiscent of photography…..that we consist entirely of “a collection of moments,” even though these flow into one another like Borges’s river.

Oliver Sachs, In the River of Consciousness

At home

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When we can be centered in ourselves,

even for brief periods of time in the face of the pull of the outer world,

not having to look elsewhere for something to fill us up or make us happy,

we can be at home wherever we find ourselves,

at peace with things as they are, moment by moment.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Develop a deep container

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A similar idea to yesterday…

Let yourself be open and life will be easier.

A spoon of salt in a glass of water makes the water undrinkable.

A spoon of salt in a lake is almost unnoticed.

Jack Kornfield, Buddha’s little Instruction Book

A large meadow

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The great Suzuki Roshi’s classic image on how meditation develops space in our lives and allows us work with whatever challenging thoughts arise: 

The way to control your sheep or cow is

to give him a large, spacious meadow .

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Complaining

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See if you can catch yourself complaining in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge.

When you complain, you make yourself a victim.

Leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.


 Eckhart Tolle