Category: Be fully present

Endless opportunities

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid.

You’re able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias and aggression. 

You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die. And you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.

Pema Chodron

Look differently

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Things don’t change.

You change your way of looking, that’s all

Carlos Castanada

photo roberto strauss

Time rushing by

Karl Duffy1 Comment
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A leap year, so we “gain” an extra day, some extra time.  How will we use it?
Why has time disappeared in our culture? How is it that after decades of inventions and new technologies devoted to saving time and labor, the result is that there is no time left?
We are a time-poor society; we are temporally impoverished. And there is no issue, no aspect of human life, that exceeds this in importance.
The destruction of time is literally the destruction of life.
Jacob Needleman, American philosopher, born 1934
photo kyknoord

Settled

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

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And now the teaching on yoga begins….

Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence.

When the mind has settled, we are established in our essential nature, which is unbounded consciousness.

Our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind.

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, c 400 AD.

Swings

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

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Don’t define your essential self in terms of a feeling. Don’t say, “I am depressed.” If you want to say, “It is depressed,” that’s all right. If you want to say depression is there, that’s fine; if you want to say gloominess is there, that’s fine. But not: I am gloomy. You’re defining yourself in terms of the feeling. That’s your illusion; that’s your mistake. There is a depression there right now, there are hurt feelings there right now, but let it be, leave it alone. It will pass. Everything passes, everything. Your depressions and your thrills have nothing to do with happiness. Those are just the swings of the pendulum

Anthony de Mello sj

photo clementina

The path

Karl Duffy7 Comments

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We can learn to recognize that the difficulty is our path instead of trying to escape from it. This is a radical yet necessary change in our perspective. When uncomfortable things happen to us, we rarely want to have anything to do with them. We might respond with the belief ‘Things shouldn’t be this way’ or ‘Life shouldn’t be so messy.’ Who says? Who says that life shouldn’t be a mess? When life is not fitting our expectations of how it’s supposed to be, we usually try to change it to fit our expectations. But the key to practice is not to try to change our life but to change our relationship to our expectations — to learn to see whatever is happening as our path.

Ezra Bayda, Being Zen

photo philip halling