Category: Be fully present

A simple saying for this day

Karl Duffy3 Comments

When you really pay attention,

everything is your teacher

Ezra Bayda

Liking where we are today….

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.

Wendall Berry

Pennies in the present moment

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

 

If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted with pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It’s that simple. What you see is what you get.

Annie Dillard

Sunday Quote: Seeing Deeper

Karl Duffy2 Comments

 

There are no unsacred places;

There are only sacred places and desecrated places.

Wendall Berry, Given

Cutting speed

Karl Duffy2 Comments

The key element of practicing with this tendency is gentleness, and the method is mindfulness. Many of us practice in a speedy environment. In a sense, speed is the disease of our times. It’s always there and it’s very hard to extract ourselves from it. But we must realize that speed is in fact just a hallucination, a self-imposed reality. Being mindful cuts speed. Being present cuts speed. If we trust in basic goodness when we look at what’s going on in our life right now, kindness and patience naturally come about.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Here and there

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Toward the end of his writings, the Catholic monk Thomas Merton seems to have come to a position which admitted the uselessness of us seeking a “true self” as a strategy, rather than just working with where we are in each moment at any given time. A lot of self-help books and even some psychology approaches set up this distinction between “me here” and “a better me there”, with a gap in-between and an emphasis on changing ourselves in order to get to that desired, truer place. Although ongoing reflection is a good thing, often all this urge for improvement reflects a type of aggression  towards ourselves, rather than helping us with our fundamental task – befriending ourselves and life as it is. It paradoxically can even reduce any capacity for growth, which starts with self-acceptance.

The time has probably come to go back on all that I have said about one’s “true self”, etc., etc. And show that there is after all no hidden mysterious “real self” other than or hiding behind the self that one is, but what all the thinking does is to observe what is there or objectify it and thus falsify it. The “real self” is not an object, but I have betrayed it by seeming to promise a possibility of knowing it somewhere, sometimes as a reward for astuteness, fidelity and a quick-witted ability to stay one jump ahead of reality.

Thomas Merton