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.

Knowing the mental energies

Karl Duffy4 Comments

storm-sailingMany people fail to distinguish between their true nature and their personality traits, particularly their less desirable traits. The fact is you are not the worst characteristics of your personality. It is the nature of the untrained mind to want what it perceives as advantageous and to fear or hate what seems painful. Discovering how your heart and mind can work together to use these feelings allows you to move beyond them. You may feel overwhelmed by the circumstances of your present life or bound by past traumatic events. Again, this is a failure in perception. They are just mind-states which can be known. They can be seen as impermanent and not belonging to you and, therefore, they do not ultimately define your true nature.

Philip Moffitt

What we label today

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Label

The only reality we know is our concept of it.

Life is nothing till we call it something, and this is where mind training comes in.

Through it we learn to hold our concepts loosely, particularly those that allow unhelpful emotions to take over and cause us problems.

Karuna Cayton, The Misleading Mind

Learning to stay

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Still-WaterSilence is simply a state we reach when, like a fire deprived of fuel, distractions and restlessness naturally fade away. When a desert monk complained that he could not control his wayward thoughts, his teacher answered “Keep on sitting in your cell and your thoughts will come back from their wanderings“. In a way then there is nothing to achieve in prayer; we do not have to try to be quiet in order to be silent, we just have to be. Silence is a state of non-being that is being itself.

Nicholas Buxton, Tantalus and the Pelican

Sunday quote: the sound of nature

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

river allondon

The deepest words of the wise …teach us

the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows

or the sound of the water when it is flowing

Antonio Machado, Spanish poet, 1875 – 1939

Let go

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Stillness_Speaks_Eckhart_Tolle-resized-600

As the days begin to shorten, we are reminded that darkness is as much of life as is light. And each day we have moments of birth and moments of loss. They give an opportunity in the practice of taking some aspects of ourselves and our lives with less importance, of letting go or dying to our fixed sense of self:

Die while you’re alive
and be absolutely dead.
Then do whatever you want:
it’s all good.

Bunan,  17th century Zen Master.

The third noble truth says that the cessation of suffering is letting go of holding on to ourselves. By “cessation” we mean the cessation of hell as opposed to just weather, the cessation of this resistance, this resentment, this feeling of being completely trapped and caught, trying to maintain huge ME at any cost.

Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness

Keeping our identities loose

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Japanese Red Crowned Crane Image 010.jpg

November 2nd  is the traditional day in Ireland and in most of Europe for visiting places of burial, a day set aside for remembering those who have died in the past year, or members of our own families who have died.  The origins of this are probably found in the Celtic awareness of the spirit world around Samhain as well as a basic awareness of the shortening of days, which  speak to us of the impermanence of all things, and the passing of time

In Japanese mythology a crane becomes immortal at the age of two thousand, when it is done being a crane.

And the tortoise becomes immortal at the age of ten thousand, when it starts being a wave.

So perhaps the purpose of experience is to wear us free of our names.

Mark Nepo. Seven Thousand Ways to Listen

Posted in Uncategorized