Category: Be fully present

Softening our bodies and mind

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Contentment doesn’t mean we are always happy about life events or deny the reality of pain. We cultivate contentment by cultivating the inner witness who is able to respond to life from a place of calmness, peace, and tranquility. So it is the ‘still heart’ — the heart of equanimity — that can welcome everything in. Instead of always living with a sense of dissatisfaction about our lives, or anticipation over what comes next, we live in the knowledge that this moment contains everything we need to be at peace, to experience freedom, to develop compassion for ourselves and others, to find God.  When we experience contentment we have softened our bodies, minds, and hearts so that we are able to release the unconscious resistances we hold to our own experience.

Christine Valters Paintner, Lectio Divina

We rush through the day, we miss so much

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Another Autumn Saturday, two more poets.

Very foggy all day yesterday, a good metaphor for how we live our lives sometimes. 

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

Denise Levertov, Witness. 

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished.

Mary Oliver, Sometimes      

Where are you going?

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We frequently get caught up in work, and identify with the pressing demands there, which pull us along and create a sense of great importance.

There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse. The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man standing alongside the road, shouts, “Where are you going?” and the first man replies, “I don’t know! Ask the horse!” This is also our story. We are riding a horse, we don’t know where we are going, and we can’t stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along, and we are powerless. We struggle all the time, even during our sleep. We are at war within ourselves…We have to learn the art of stopping – stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us. 

 Thích Nhât Hanh, The Heart of the Buddhas Teaching

Like a mirror

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror;

it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing;

it receives, but does not keep.

Chuang-tzu, 4th Century BC

One hour at a time

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

 

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask
of anything, or anyone,
yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.

Mary Oliver, Snow Geese

One world at a time

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Satisfaction is very close and simple: the strange happiness of completely joining with whatever we are doing in that moment… When the writer Thoreau was on his deathbed, a visitor asked him – “from where you lie, so close to the brink of the dark river, can you say how the opposite shore looks to you?”

It is said that he replied gently, “One world at a time”

Susan Murphy, Upside Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the ordinary