Category: Be fully present

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Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Belonging is related to longing.  If you hyphenate belonging, it yields a lovely axiom for spiritual growth:  Be – Your – Longing.  Longing is a precious instinct in the soul. Where you belong should always be worthy of your dignity. You should belong first in your own interiority.  If you belong there, and if you are in rhythm with yourself and connected to that deep, unique source within, then you will never be vulnerable when your outside belonging is qualified, relativized, or taken away.  You will still be able to stand on your own ground, the ground of your soul, where you are not a tenant, where you are at home.

John O’Donohue,  Anamchara

photo bart whelan

Not avoiding

Karl Duffy2 Comments
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To see myself and my life as they truly are is joy. 
After all the struggle and avoiding and denying and going the other way,
 it is deeply satisfying for a second to be there with life as it is. 
The satisfaction is the very core of ourselves.
 Who we are is beyond words –
 just that open power of life,  manifesting constantly in all sorts of interesting things,
 even in our own misery and struggles. 
The hassle is both horrendous and wholesome.
Charlotte Joko Beck.

Dissolving fear

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if we could only arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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Staying fluid

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seaWhen you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine many things with a confused body and mind, you might suppose that your mind and nature are fixed. However, if you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that there is nothing at all that has an unchanging self.

Dogen

Sunday Quote: Step by step

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Learning to walk...step by step.jpg

If the path before you is clear,

you’re probably on someone else’s

Joseph Campbell

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Bare Attention

Karl Duffy2 Comments

If you would look at a flower, any thought about that flower prevents you from looking at it. The words the rose, the violet, it is this flower, that flower, it is that species,  keep you from observing. To look there must be no interference of the word, which is the objectifying of thought. There must be freedom from the word, and to look there must be silence; otherwise you can’t look. If you look at your wife or husband, all the memories that you have had, either of pleasure or pain, interfere with looking. It is only when you look without the image that there is a relationship.

Jiddu Krisnmurti.

Photo Daniel J Layton