Category: Be fully present

Allow life to be a conversation

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

two people 3

The conversational nature of reality means that whatever you want from life will not occur in exactly the way you’d like it to. But, also, whatever life wants from you – society wants from you, your parents want from you, your partner wants from you, your children want from you – will also not occur.  And that what occurs is this third quality which is more like a meeting and a dynamic of the two, a conversation between the two.  I’d like to speak about the life that can actually be conversation in its essence, where we don’t choose too early in the process and we allow things to come to fruition in a surprising, nourishing, and generous way.

David Whyte, What to Remember when Waking

It’s Saturday: Do nothing

Karl Duffy4 Comments

still water

Doing nothing does not mean going to sleep, but it does mean resting — resting the mind by being present to whatever is happening in the moment, without adding on the effort of attempting to control it. Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.

Sharon Salzberg, How Doing Nothing Can Help You Truly Live

No point comparing: This moment is all there is

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

berries33Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic or visible, plant or animal, extinct or living. So there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or to heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known. The particulars count

Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, There you are

Experience without judgment

Karl Duffy4 Comments

Cat-observing

The more I practiced, and the more I read about the practice, I realized that meditation was not meant to purge our minds of negative emotions or thought patterns, but rather meant to help us experience them without judgment. We were to let go of our resistance to pain at the deepest level and understand that we suffer not because pain is bad, but because our mind labels it as bad.

Kenji, Looking Back: My First Year as a Meditation Practitioner

Cultivating

Karl DuffyLeave a comment
planting_seeds_4l
To establish mindfulness and full awareness in daily life relies on a skilful filtering of the input of stuff coming at us from all directions, because the sheer deluge of contact can overwhelm them: what we give attention to receives our energy and enters our hearts, and there it stimulates action and reaction. Because we consequently build up bright or dark habits, we need to be responsible about what we give attention to. Part of cultivation is therefore about turning away from input and actions that just pull the mind out into craving or aversion or distraction. …Fathoming attention then is an action that causes us to pause, and takes us into our minds and hearts more deeply.
Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma

Having an attentive eye

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:An Autumn Field - geograph.org.uk - 615320.jpg

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty,

and in the same field, it beholds, every hour,

a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson