Category: Be fully present

Sunday Quote: Miracles

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A miracle is often the willingness to see the common

in an uncommon way.

Noah benShea

As a friend

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Here is a practice I have been working with for more than a decade. I recite, usually silently, these two sentences:

May I meet this moment fully.
May I meet it as a friend.

These blessing phrases cultivate and sustain a mind of peace and goodwill. For me, they represent the promise of practice. “May I meet this moment fully” expresses my faith that an alert and balanced mind is a possibility for human beings. “May I meet it as a friend” reminds me that my mind’s natural benevolence is my best refuge. Although most of my daily practice has always been the simple practice of alert attention to changing experience, I often begin periods of simple sitting with some repetitions of this two-phrase mantra as a kind of mood-setter, an incliner of my mind toward relaxing.

Sylvia Boorstein, A Bad Day at the Airport

An invitation to fullness

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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There is really no place to go in this moment. We are already here. Can we be here fully?

There really is nothing to do. Can we let go into non-doing, into pure being? There really is nothing to attain, no special “state” or “feeling” because whatever you are experiencing in this moment is already special, already extraordinary,  by virtue of the fact that it is being experienced.

The paradox of this invitation is that everything you might wish for is already here.

And the only important thing is  – to be the knowing that awareness already is.

Jon Kabat Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners

Welcome to this world

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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Another reflection on the calming effects of nature.

This famous haiku reflects on the letting go found under a tree when all things feel at home and we know that beauty is being born at every second.  At times like this we treat all moments and all people as friends

In the cherry blossom’s shade
there’s no such thing
as a stranger

Kobayashi Issa, 1763 – 1828

A doorway into thanks

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Coquelicots en gare de Vaires-sur-Marne.jpg

It doesn’t have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

Mary Oliver, Praying

photo tango paso

Why a walk in nature helps

Karl Duffy5 Comments

tree light

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

David Wagoner, Lost