Category: Be fully present

Wanting and Blaming

Karl Duffy1 Comment

If you really aren’t trying to get anywhere else in this moment,  patience  takes care of itself. It is a remembering that things unfold in their own time. The seasons cannot be hurried. Spring comes, the grass grows by itself. Being in a hurry usually doesn’t help and it can create a great deal of suffering. Patience is an ever-present alternative to the mind’s endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly is anger. It’s the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself)  or something for it.

Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, There you Are

Hold this day lightly

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Most of us are very good at bringing suffering upon ourselves, by taking something that is happening and fixating on it, creating a worry and letting it take root inside us. We are less good at simply letting things be, without wanting to fix the world according to our preferences: 

Sitting quietly,

doing nothing,

Spring comes,

and the grass grows,

by itself.

Matsuo Bashō, 1644 – 1694

Like being re-born each day

Karl Duffy2 Comments

There is no ideal in observation.
When you have an ideal, you cease to observe,
you are then merely approximating the present to the idea,
and therefore there is duality, conflict,
and all the rest of it.

The mind has to be in the state when it can see, observe.
The experience of the observation
is really an astonishing state.

In that there is no duality.
The mind is simply —

aware

Jiddu Krisnamurti

Fresh eyes

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Much of life is ruined for us by a blanket or shroud of familiarity that descends between us and everything that matters. It dulls our senses and stops us appreciating everything, from the beauty of a sunset to our work and our friends. Children don’t suffer from habit, which is why they get excited by some very key but simple things — like puddles, jumping on the bed, sand, and fresh bread. But we adults get ineluctably spoiled, which is why we seek ever more powerful stimulants, like fame and love.

The trick …. is to recover the powers of appreciation of a child in adulthood, to strip the veil of habit and therefore to start to look upon daily life with a new and more grateful sensitivity.

Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

The modern temptation: Letting work define us

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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

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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