Category: Be fully present

The core conversation

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It might be surprising to think that there are just as many forms of courage and creativity associated with disappearance and doing without; just as many satisfying elements of aliveness associated with a winter as with spring. This central, core conversation to which we return in each succeeding winter is both nourishing and deeply disturbing, it seems heedless of any flimsy structures we may have erected, it seems fiery in that it burns familiar things away and yet provides another form of warmth emanating from a more nested, interior hearth. In my experience the first necessity of an individual in finding this fiery, core conversation is a radical form of simplification. To get to the core conversation we have to withdraw from the edges. Whatever expenses we have been making at the margins of our lives in terms of emotions, finances or time-based commitment must be brought back to the central conversation that makes the most sense.

David Whyte

Noticing beauty

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A good intention for this year would not necessarily be to do more, but to turn up fully for our lives and experience deeply the beauty in each moment:

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed,

whether or not we will or sense them.  

The least we can do is try to be there.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Enough

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If we do not push ourselves enough, we do not grow, but if we push ourselves too much, we regress.

What is enough will change, depending on where we are and what we are doing.

In that sense, the present moment is always some kind of beginning.

 Sakyong Mipham, Running with the Mind of Meditation

Sunday Quote: Ending and beginning

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All endings are also beginnings.

We just don’t know it at the time.

Mitch Albom

The Comparing mind

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We are coming up to that time of year when resolutions are encouraged and this can sometimes lead to a desire to  fix ourselves and becoming dissatisfied with our life:

We are born with only one obligation – to be completely who we are. Yet how much of our time is spent comparing ourselves to others, dead and alive? This is encouraged as necessary in the pursuit of excellence. Yet a flower in its excellence does not yearn to be a fish, and a fish in its unmanaged elegance does not long to be a tiger. But we humans find ourselves always falling into the dream of another life. Or we secretly aspire to the fortune or fame of people we don’t really know. When feeling badly about ourselves, we often try on other skins rather than understand and care for our own. Yet when we compare ourselves to others, we see neither ourselves nor those we look up to. We only experience the tension of comparing, as if there is only one ounce of being to feed all our hungers.

Mark Nepo, The Book Of Awakening

What peace means

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The Christian calendar today remembers the story in the gospel of Matthew which tells how King Herod ordered the killing of all the children in an attempt to murder Jesus. It is striking that this feast day is celebrated just a few  days after the celebration of Christmas, which is associated with joy. It draws attention to the reality of our changing experience, that sadness can follow joy very quickly, or disappointment come when least expected. Or maybe to the reality of the world, as many people experience violence and hatred every day, no matter what time of year.

To experience peace does not mean that your life is always blissful.

It means that you are capable of tapping into a blissful state of mind amidst the normal chaos of a hectic life.

Jill Boite Taylor, American neuroanatomist.