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.

Don’t wait

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How do we enter our lives fully? How do we want to live?

Can we allow all our joys and sorrows to enliven us? Or do we just go along with all our patterns and habits? People who are dying always remind me: ‘I can’t believe I wasn’t here for most of my life.’ That’s one of the most common things I hear, and the biggest regrets. Many people have not inhabited their life because they’re just waiting for other moments. Are we waiting for life to happen in the midst of life? How can we give ourselves fully to our lives, moment to moment?

Don’t wait. Life is always right here.

Koshin Paley Ellison

Let life flow

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When you get out of the driver’s seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself.

When you get out of the driver’s seat, it can drive itself so much easier – it can flow in ways you never imagined.

Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the “me” is no longer in the way.

Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.


Adyashanti

Clear and still

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Just as a solid rock is not shaken by the storm, even so the wise are not affected by praise or blame.

On hearing the Teachings, the wise become perfectly purified, like a lake deep, clear and still.

Dhammapada 81, 82

a waste of time

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The mind is always seeking zones of safety, and these zones of safety are continually falling apart. Then we scramble to get another zone of safety back together again. We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart.

That’s samsara: The cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.

Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape

Fruitfulness

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In the old Irish, Celtic, calendar, Autumn begins in August, so now we are reaching the end of the second month of the season. In Irish the word for September is Meán Fómhair, which means the ‘middle of the harvest’. What do we harvest? The fruits of what we have planted in our lives.

There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control over its development and to make it available in large quantities. Success brings many rewards and often fame. Fruits however, come from weakness and vulnerability. And fruits are unique. A child is the fruit conceived in vulnerability, community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another’s wounds. Let’s remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness.


Henri Nouwen

Resisting what is

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Your mind has decided what you want to be happening, and what you don’t want to be happening, and that’s what you’re having a problem with.

The cause of suffering is that you have a way you want it to be… and now you suffer when it’s not that way, don’t you? You decided, “I don’t want it to be a certain way.” Then you suffer, when it is that way. I want it to be a certain way. It doesn’t be that way. You suffer……Because you have made up in your mind how you want the moment in front of you – and by the way, the moment that hasn’t happened yet and the one that already happened – how you want them to be. Because you did that with your mind, you are suffering.

Here’s how I define suffering. If you have to be doing anything about it to try and be OK, it means you’re suffering.

Michael Singer, Every Day Gets Lighter When You Let Go of Yourself