Category: Be fully present

At ease with our fundamental nature

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A deeper feeling – a sense of groundlessness or loneliness –  is normal in humans,  and part of meditation practice is learning to sit with this. Advent, when a lot of running around is encouraged,  is a good time to notice the energies connected with this.

The restlessness of our inner abyss. Pope Francis, Church of the Gesù, Jan 2014

As I look out at the world, I see that a lot of us are just running around in circles pretending that there’s ground where there actually isn’t any ground. And that somehow, if we could learn to not be afraid of groundlessness, not be afraid of insecurity and uncertainty, it would be calling on an inner strength that would allow us to be open and free and loving and compassionate in any situation. But as long as we keep trying to scramble to get ground under our feet and avoid this uneasy feeling of groundlessness and insecurity and uncertainty and ambiguity and paradox, any of that, then the wars will continue.  It’s like the matrix of creative potential. The matrix of the spiritual life. It’s like if we could rest there, which I suppose would be the description of enlightenment or the mystic, you know. Rest in that place, and is completely happy. 

Pema Chodron, Interview with Bill Moyers, Faith and Reason, 2006

In the body

Karl Duffy2 Comments

 

 Can we stop judging our whole life just because of a disturbing feeling in the body?

All of our reactions to people, to situations, to thoughts in our mind

– are actually reactions to the kind of sensations that are arising in our body.

Tara Brach

It’s another Monday

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The mind is constantly making judgments about ourselves, others, or how this day is going to be. Better to stick with the moment-to-moment experience, and avoid coming to conclusions before they happen.

Our daily world is commonly held in terms of non-specific generalizations, like its ‘another Monday,’ or, ‘a typical man’, or ,‘I dread meeting Janice, she’s always like this,’ or ‘I’m hopeless.’ In fact ……. any sense of a lasting entity or state of being is an act of generalization. It’s a useful convention, but one that allows the mind’s neuroses and corruptions to be projected onto the here and now.

Ajahn Sucitto, The Low Point

The paradox of human life

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The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings.

If we refuse to hold them in hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.   

Parker Palmer

Living in the midst of uncertainty

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In the Christian calendar,  this is the last week of the year, so some of the reflections around this time are on how to arrive at the end of one’s life without regret and with a sense of acceptance and wisdom. Do we ever get to any real place of resolution in this world?

This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess and that’s what I mean by Hallelujah…. That’s what it’s all about. It says that none of this – you’re not going to be able to work this thing out – you’re not going to be able to set – this realm does not admit to revolution – there’s no solution to this mess. The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say ‘Look, I don’t understand a fucking thing at all – Hallelujah! That’s the only moment that we live here fully as human beings.

Leonard Cohen

Monday morning choice

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Its not so much what happens in a day that causes suffering, but our response to it:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms —

to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances,

to choose one’s own way.

Viktor Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning