Money is human happiness in the abstract;
He, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.
Schopenhauer
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.
Encompassed
All beings are encompassed within one all-encompassing great energy:
This I understood from the coolness of this morning’s passing breeze
Wu-men Hui-k’ai, 1183 -1260, Chinese Chan Master
A new month
Be passionate about some part of the natural and/or human worlds and take risks on its behalf, no matter how vulnerable they make you. No one ever died saying, “I’m sure glad for the self-centered, self-serving and self-protective life I lived.”
Offer yourself to the world — your energies, your gifts, your visions, your heart — with open-hearted generosity. But understand that when you live that way you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail.
To grow in love and service, you — I, all of us — must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success… Clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life. So, cultivate beginner’s mind, walk straight into your not-knowing, and take the risk of failing and falling again and again, then getting up again and again to learn — that’s the path to a life lived large, in service of love, truth, and justice.
Parker Palmer, The Six Pillars of the Wholehearted Life, Commencement Address, Naropa University
Sunday Quote: Unsettled
People wish to be settled;
only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is this?
A classic practice in the Korean Zen tradition – may help with staying open to our experience today
In the Korean Zen tradition, one generally meditates on the koan, What is this? This question derives from an encounter between the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng (638–713 C.E.), and a young monk, Huaijang. The most important part of the practice is for the question to remain alive and for your whole body and mind to become a question. In Zen they say that you have to ask with the pores of your skin and the marrow of your bones. A Zen saying points out: Great questioning, great awakening; little questioning, little awakening; no questioning, no awakening.
Martine Batchelor, What is this?
The beauty within us
Incredibly warm Spring weather here these days, signs of growth all round
It’s the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us.
The question is not what you look at but what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
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