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.

Letting go of the “shoulds”

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It’s natural to move toward what feels good and away from what doesn’t, natural as well to have values, principles, and morals. But when these healthy inclinations become internal rules – “shoulds,” “musts,” and “gottas” – then there is a big problem. We feel driven, righteous, or like a failure.  At bottom, “shoulds” are not about events. They’re about what you want to experience (especially emotions and sensations) if your demands on reality are met, or what you fear you’ll experience if they’re not.  Whether your “shoulds” are shaped by neural programs laid down when dinosaurs ruled the earth, or when you were in grade school, they often operate unconsciously or barely semi-consciously – all the more powerfully for lurking in the shadows. Plus, in a deep sense, your “shoulds” control you.

Rick Hanson

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The depth beneath our thoughts.

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In 1929 the British Broad­casting Corporation decided to start broadcasting “live silence” in memory of the dead instead of just halting transmission for two minutes every day; it was important, it was felt, to hear the rustle of papers, the singing of the birds outside, an occasional cough. As a BBC spokesman put it, with rare wisdom, silence is “a solvent which destroys personality and gives us leave to be great and universal.” It permits us, in short, to be who we are and could be if only we had the openness and trust. A chapel is where we hear something and nothing, ourselves and everyone else, a silence that is not the absence of noise, but the presence of something much deeper: the depth beneath our thoughts.

A chapel is where you can hear something beating below your heart.

Pico Iyer, Where Silence Is Sacred

A morning meditation

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I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

John O’Donohue, A Morning Offering

Sometimes out of reach

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What I most want is to spring out of this personality, then to sit apart from that leaping.  I’ve lived too long where I can be reached. Rumi

Our lives are often like over-packed suitcases. It seems like we are always busy, always over-pressured, always one phone call, one text message, one email, one visit, and one task behind. We are forever anxious about what we have still left undone, about whom we have disappointed, about unmet expectations. Moreover, inside of all of that, we can forever be reached. We have no quiet island to escape to, no haven of solitude. We can always be reached. Half the world has our contact numbers and we feel pressure to be available all the time. So we often feel as if we are on a treadmill from which we would want to step off. And within all that busyness, pressure, noise, and tiredness we long for solitude, long for some quiet, peaceful island where all the pressure and noise will stop and we can sit in simple rest. That’s a healthy yearning. It’s our soul speaking. Like our bodies, our souls too keep trying to tell us what they need.

[But]…Solitude is not something we turn on like a water faucet. It needs a body and mind slowed down enough to be attentive to the present moment. We are in solitude when….we fully taste the water we are drinking, feel the warmth of our blankets, and are restful enough to be content inside our own skin. We don’t often accomplish this, despite sincere effort, but we need to keep making new beginnings.

Ron Rolheiser, Longing For Solitude

Sunday Quote: Share

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The Joy that isn’t shared,
I’ve heard,
dies young.
 
Anne Sexton, Welcome Morning

From dawn to dusk, compete and yet not

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Light filters through tinted windows over a set of stairs at United Evangelical Lutheran Church on Sunday, March 25, 2012, in Swiss Alp , Texas. ( Smiley N. Pool / Houston Chronicle ) Photo: Smiley N. Pool, Staff / © 2012 Houston ChronicleAs the house of a person
in age sometimes grows cluttered
with what is too loved or too heavy to part with,
the heart may grow cluttered.
And still the house will be emptied,
and still the heart.

As the thoughts of a person
in age sometimes grow sparer,
like a great cleanness come into a room,
the soul may grow sparer;
one sparrow song carves it completely.
And still the room is full,
and still the heart.

Empty and filled,
like the curling half-light of morning,
in which everything is still possible and so why not.

Filled and empty,
like the curling half-light of evening,
in which everything now is finished and so why not.

Jane Hirshfield, (extract), Standing Deer