Category: Be fully present

Sitting through difficulties

Karl Duffy4 Comments

File:An Afghan elder and his cat sit outside his store at the Anaba bazaar in Panjshir province, Afghanistan.jpg

When we sit we are doing two things. First, sitting becomes a container; whatever has happened we sit still and feel it. The other side of sitting is the stillness of non-reactivity. We feel all…without doing anything to anybody. The feeling becomes our own responsiblity. Instead of our attention being directed, as it usually is, to making somebody else treat us differently, the way we want to be treated, we come back to experiencing what is at stake in being treated this way, what the hurt is really all about, and who we think we are that we can be hurt.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness

Sunday Quote: Recognize

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:The Ashopton Viaduct on a misty morning - geograph.org.uk - 559778.jpg

You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going.

What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage.

Thomas Merton

photo David Lally

Seasons in life

Karl Duffy5 Comments

File:Shore west beach waves.jpg

Now all you can do is wait.

It must be hard for you, but there is a right time for everything.

Like the ebb and flow of tides.

No one can do anything to change them.

When it is time to wait, you must wait

Haruki Murakumi, Japanese writer 1949 – , The Wind up Bird Chronicle

Why meditation helps

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Turet ACFJ 064

Meditation is the discovery

that the point of life is always arrived at

in the immediate moment.

Alan Watts

with thanks again to Ellen for the beautiful autumn photo

An act of hospitality

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Sit down and relax.jpg

Mindfulness is an act of hospitality.

A way of learning to treat ourselves with kindness and care that slowly begins to percolate into the deepest recesses of our being while gradually offering us the possibility of relating to others in the same manner. Working with whatever is present is enough. There is no need to condemn ourselves for not feeling loving or kind. Rather, the process simply asks us to entertain the possibility of offering hospitality to ourselves no matter what we are feeling or thinking.

This week try taking some time to explore the possibility of sitting with yourself as if you were your own best friend.

Saki Santorelli, Befriending Self

photo Carriec

 

A way of direct experience

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Mother-Child care.jpg

The way that can be spoken is not the eternal way
That which can be named is not the eternal name

Lao Tzu,  Tao Te Ching, 1

“Talking about a path is not walking that path.
Thinking about life is not living“.

Directly experiencing life is not something we do easily. By the time we are adults, our experience is mediated through a multitude of conceptual filters that provide a constant commentary about our life, but that ignore the thing itself. This process is so deeply conditioned in most of us that we don’t even notice it. We wander through day after day with our minds spinning an endless stream of thoughts, judgments, hopes, fantasies, critiques, and plans, all mixed with a babble of advertising jingles and fragments of television shows.  Lao-tzu suggests that this habitual commentary on life, though a natural part of being human, is not the same thing as a fully lived life. At the same time, he does not totally discount the conceptual thinking process. We make a certain kind of sense out of our life through the use of categories, thoughts, and words. But,  he suggests … these thoughts and words are gateways to life, not life itself.

 Commentary on the Tao Te Ching by William Martin in A Path and A Practice

photo:  without you