Category: Be fully present

Clouds

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

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Good practice is about fear. Fear takes the form of constantly thinking, speculating, analyzing, fantasizing. With all that activity we create a cloud to keep ourselves safe in make-believe practice. True practice is not safe; it’s anything but safe. But we don’t like that, so we obsess with our feverish efforts to achieve our version of the personal dream. Such obsessive practice is itself just another cloud between ourselves and reality. The only thing that matters is seeing with an impersonal spotlight: seeing things as they really are. 

Charlotte Joko Beck

Right here, right now

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

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Through recognizing the distinction between appearance and illusion, you give yourself permission to acknowledge that some of your perceptions may be wrong or biased, that your ideas of how things are may have solidified to the degree that you cannot see any other point of view but your own. When I began to recognize the emptiness and clarity of my own mind, my life became richer in ways I never could have imagined. Once I shed my ideas about how things should be, I became free to respond to my experience exactly as it was and exactly as I was, right there, right then.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living

Listening

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Essential for working with what is unknown is an attitude of unknowing.

This leaves room for the phenomenon itself to speak.

It alone may keep us from delusions

James Hilmann, The Dream and the Underworld

photo: Solveig Askjem

Simple presence

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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Moments of natural meditation are happening to us all the time. We pause at a stop sign while driving or taking a walk, just for a moment, preoccupations of that important meeting tomorrow or memories of yesterday’s flood of emails fall away. We are simply there, noticing other walkers and drivers, cars and sunlight, clouds and trees.  A dog barks, and in the distance we hear a siren. For a  fleeting moment we have a more intense experience of simple presence.

Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Wakefulness

Open to being surprised

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

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Our capacity for surprise is often an unused blessing. With every appearance, it prods us to ask, “Beneath our problem-solving, what is life asking of us”? “Beneath our ideas of happiness or suffering, what does it really mean to live”? So often we try to change things, only to find that our honest engagement with experience often changes us. In trying to make life fit our needs, our sense of need is often softened or broken,  until we fit life.

Mark Nepo, The Gift of Surprise

Photo:  Steve Evans, Monastery Door, Ladakh,

…. being and doing

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence, there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling in the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth. If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have not rest, God does not bless our work. If we twist our lives out of shape in order to fill every corner of them with action and experience, God will seem silently to withdraw from our hearts and leave us empty.

Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

photo : jon rawlinson