Category: Be fully present

Our silent war

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At almost any point in my day if I stop and check down inside, I will find some version of my silent mantra – this moment should be different! – going on. I dislike how it is right now. It is not so pleasant. I want it to be like it was the other day, last week, last year. Or, I love how it is right now. It’s very pleasant. I want it to stay. How can I make this pleasant feeling stay? How can I keep the flow of experience from snatching it away? Oh don’t let it go. Each of us has our own silent War With Reality. And whatever our particular War With Reality is, the result is always a pervasive sense of the unsatisfactoriness of the moment.

Stephen Cope, The Wisdom of Yoga

Stay focused on the present

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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All time is here in this body.

The past exists in its memory and the future in its anticipation, and both of these are now, for when the world is inspected directly and clearly, past and future times are nowhere to be found

Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

Journeys

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This is the mystery and the pain of our lives: every one of us is exactly where we need to be, but we don’t know it. We’re looking for somewhere else to be. The spiritual odyssey, life’s deepest and most significant undertaking, involves a great effort and inevitably it leads us on through many disasters and troubles in the checkered course of our living and growing. And where to we end up? Back where we started from. Back to ourselves. Only now maybe with more wisdom.

Norman Fischer

Non-distancing awareness

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Zen is the taste of your own tongue in your own mouth. It’s a way to find something very simple that’s already present within you — a subtler, sharper, non-distanced, and non-distancing awareness.
 
Everything else emerges from this intimacy with your own life, this opening into attention. We become the instruments of our lives and become part of the orchestra of the larger existences that our lives in turn are part of.
 
Jane Hirshfield, American Poet, 1953 –

Inside, not out

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Finding a refuge to come home to

Each one of us has a place to live, be it Ireland, France, Switzerland or the USA. And each of us has a set of current circumstances with which to live. These are our “plots of land”. It is by working with things as they are that we are challenged to find contentment

As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found – in himself.

Erich Fromm

Staying with our plot of land

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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How do we cultivate the conditions for joy to expand?  We train in staying present.  In sitting meditation, we train in mindfulness and maitri (friendliness) :   in being steadfast with our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts.  We stay with our own little plot of earth and trust that it can be cultivated, that cultivation will bring it to its full potential.  Even though it’s full of rocks and the soil is dry, we begin to plow this plot of patience.  We let the process evolve naturally. . .