Category: Be fully present

Hold things lightly and go easy

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When the shoe fits, the foot is forgotten,
When the belt fits, the belly is forgotten,
When the heart is right
“For” and “against” are forgotten.

No drives, no compulsions,
No needs, no attractions:
Then your affairs are under control.
You are a free  person.

Easy is right. Begin right
And you are easy.
Continue easy and you are right.
The right way to go easy
Is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.

Chuang Tzu, 4th Century BC, In the Dark Before Dawn, (trans. Thomas Merton)

Simple advice for mental health: pause and notice

Karl Duffy3 Comments

 

There is often a harmony between ancient stories and modern psychology. Yesterday’s reading in the Catholic liturgy reminded us to “stay awake“. When the Buddha started to teach, he met some who,  recognizing something special in him, asked: “Are you a god?” He simply replied: “I am awake.”

So…. staying aware of what is around us, pausing and noticing –  not taking small things too seriously or getting submerged in the worries of this Monday –  seems to be related to psychological health.

Goethe gives us a simple practical way :

A man should hear a little music,

read a little poetry,

and see a fine picture every day of his life,

in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful

which God has implanted in the human soul.

Goethe

Sunday Quote: More means happier

Karl Duffy1 Comment

 

Went to an outlet mall in Kildare yesterday to get some bread, 30 minutes before the other stores opened. 8.30 am,  car parks already full, even buses arriving with shoppers from around the country. The modern Western tendency toward mid-winter speeding up and  shopping. An interior felt-sense of running…

Advertising finds fertile ground in the mind’s response to an underlying sense of life as unsatisfactory. Meditation is essentially training the mind to free it from the type of craving which generates stress and anxiety.

How much does a person lack in him or herself

who must have many things?

Sen no Rikyū 1522 – 1591, Japanese Zen Tea master

Bare trees

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Whoever has learned how to listen to trees
No longer wants to be a tree.
He longs to be nothing
except what he is
That is home
That is happiness
Hermann Hesse

Not limiting ourselves

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Our identity, which seems so reliable, so substantial,  is in fact very fluid, very  dynamic. There are unlimited possibilities to what we might think, what we might feel, and how we might experience reality. We have what it takes to free ourselves from the suffering of a fixed reality and connect with the fundamental ….mystery of our being, which has no fixed identity. Your sense of yourself – who you think you are at a relative level – is a very restricted version of who you truly are. 

Pema Chodron, Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change

Who we really are

Karl Duffy2 Comments

When we taste something, what is the ‘realness’ of it? We can say, ‘It tastes nice’ but this is what we think about it, not what the taste is. We can say, ‘It’s a grape’, but that’s a designation, a perception, isn’t it? What is the actual taste? We say, ‘It’s sweet’, but ‘sweet’ is a judgment, isn’t it? We come to understand that the reality of it is indefinable, and that for most of our life we are operating at the level of interpretations and classifications, of secondary experiences, rather than living the actuality of it. We never even know who we really are, because everything is constantly changing; the reference points are changing so although we feel we’re something, nothing quite fits. So as long as we identify with the world of change and appearance, this is all we shall ever feel ourselves to be, just an appearance that changes and wants to find a certain position.

Ajahn  Sucitto, Gnosis and non-dualism