Category: Be fully present

The modern temptation: Letting work define us

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Candle lights (565924507).jpg

For Christians this evening begins three days of reflection, the most significant part of the yearly calendar.

Often people devote their primary attention to the facts of their lives, to their situation, to their work, to their status. Most of their energy goes into doing. Meister Echhart writes beautifully about this temptation. He says many people wonder where they should be and what they should do, when in fact they should be more concerned about how to be. The love side of your life is the place of greatest tenderness within you. In a culture preoccupied with fixities and definites and correspondingly impatient mystery, it is difficult to step out from the transparency of false light into the more candlelit world of the soul.

John O’Donohue

photo: echiner1

Sunday Quote: Quiet

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Lazy Autumn Afternoon (15635450996).jpg

A quote for the beginning of the most important week in the Christian calendar:

The quieter you become

The more you can hear

Ram Dass

photo USFWS Mountain Prairie

Being kind to ourselves – even the difficult bits

Karl Duffy6 Comments

File:Shadow Person.jpg

Face the shadow side of yourself, but do not identify with it. It represents only part of who you are.  So there is a difference between relating to the denied parts of yourself (bringing light to them), and totally “acting them out” (which is to leave them in their unconscious and dark state). This is why it is so foundational to know yourself, and to learn to be honest about your real motivations.

The hero in us wants to attack, fix, or deny the existence of our dark side. We can also be tempted to share dramatically everything about it as a way to control it (sometimes called ventilating or dumping). The saint merely weeps over the shadow and forgives it — and by God’s grace forgives himself for being a mere human. He opens his arms to that which has been in exile and welcomes it home for the friend that it often is.

Richard Rohr,  On the Threshold of Transformation: Daily Meditations for Men

Never enough

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:You are here.jpg

One of the more persistent forms of suffering, the sense that we have to do more, have more:

One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have

is to feel that now is not enough.

Pema Chodron

Stopping negative thoughts

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Ripples in a Pond at Padmanabham.jpg

Keep your heart clear and spacious

and you will never be hooked. 

A single disturbed thought 

causes ten thousand distractions

Ryokan, Zen Buddhist monk, 1758 – 1831

photo Adityamadhav83

 

It’s mid-week: Jump into life

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Child01.jpg

Hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!

Think… and think… while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time
            before death.

If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten —
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest
that does all the work.

Kabir.

photo GFDL