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.

A meeting place

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We need to prepare a meeting place, an awareness that can meet what arises without contracting.  The basis of this is training in mindfulness: staying with contact without formulating a self and a reaction. This means that for a moment you can not know how things should be, or what to do. If you allow yourself this mindful uncertainty, that opens the essential space for a response rather than a reaction to arise. So when the feeling and the impression or ‘meaning’ come up, just wait right there. Don’t work from previous models. Don’t blink. Don’t try to change it. Don’t make a ‘me’ out of it. Then hold your awareness where it subsides. And with skill in that, the world of ‘me and it’ changes by itself.

Ajahn Sucitto, Is there an End?

photo steve evans from Citizen of the World

Starting over, again and again

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That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb with fatigue, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.

Mark Nepo, Hearing the Cries of the World

photo Daniel Francisco madrigal Moller

Allowing things to sit

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“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Beauty and Terror

I was intrigued reading over these words, just this morning  as I sat watching my faithful pup breathe out a most-contented sigh : It’s as if in these short moments, simple flecks of time, he is able to surrender fully to all of life and that which life brings us. And just by breathing in…he settles in.

A friend joked the other day that he and his dog both suffered the troubles of a “5 minute memory”…as if, this was such a very bad thing. But, perhaps that is the trick of it, isn’t it? To allow things to sit, for only just a little bit — and then bid them farewell as they slip away into another day.

“No feeling is ever final.” Too often, we find ourselves struggling to hold onto happiness — fearing it forever lost in the wash of emotions that life carries with it. And we are left to wonder, how we may embrace the absolute richness of this life when we ourselves appear to weaken. How do we create a happiness that is big enough to experience all of these moments — the fear, the pain, the heartache and sorrow, and that will also allow for continuous gratitude, as well?

It’s this very impermanence that creates a space of ‘fully living.’  So, my dears, instead of worrying so very much over ‘what might have been’… “ flare up like a flame and make big shadows” .. for true happiness to settle in.

Pema Chodron, Finding Happiness Amongst Uncertainty

photo eugene0126jp

Staying in the present moment

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When we wake up in bed on Monday morning and think of the various hurdles we’ve got to jump that day, immediately we feel sad.

Bored and bothered.

Whereas actually we’re just lying in bed.

Alan Watts

photo christoper michel

Sunday Quote: Change

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focus stained glass

To be interested in the changing seasons

is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

George Santayana

Forgetting ourselves

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No despair of ours can alter the reality of things,
or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.

Indeed we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us,
for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.

Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget
ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the
general dance.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation