Category: Be fully present

Over-identification

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are,  beyond name and form. Because of its undifferentiated nature, it is hard to find a name that precisely describes this emotion. ‘Fear’ comes close, but apart from a continuous sense of threat, it also includes a deep sense of abandonment and incompleteness. It may be best to use a term that is as undifferentiated as that basic emotion and simply call it ‘pain.’

One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.  You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego. The mind is then toppled from its place of power and Being reveals itself as your true nature.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

What’s our focus

Karl Duffy4 Comments

If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live.

If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.

Thomas Merton, Love and Living

Complaint

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. It’s the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid.

Pema Chodron

Our relationship to what is

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

No matter how much we like or dislike, or are hurt or maimed by a thought, action or event, our attitudes do not colour the event itself, only our relationship to it.

As this is so, no matter how much we stomp or shout or cajole or whine, reality is what it is. In this is sacredness and dignity.

Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi, Cutting the Cat Into One: the Practice of the Bodhisattva Precepts

Courage

Karl Duffy2 Comments

The realm of heroism doesn’t lie in outward action; it is within us, where we form our attitude towards things, that the hero is born, not in the deeds that he or she does to save the world. Every human being who gets up in the morning and forms a positive attitude to overcome their obstacles and live in the face of the destructive forces around them is a hero. And they will always be a hero, whether they succeed or fail, because the hero is already there in the attitude, regardless of whether they live or die in the context of all the forces that would drag us down.

The hero starts here, and starts now, by saying, yes – I can Be. I can have a wish for the good.

Lee van Laer, Parabola Magazine

Sunday Quote: Celebrate this Day

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

May anxiety never linger about you.  May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul. Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention. Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.  May you experience each day as a sacred gift,  woven around the heart of wonder.

John O’Donohue, For Presence