Be fully present – Page 744

Trusting the ups and downs of life

July 20, 2012July 17, 2012 Karl Duffy3 Comments

Due to the current overlay of therapy terminology in our language, everyone now seems to wish for “closure.” This word is unfortunate: it is not faithful to the open-ended rhythm of experience. Creatures made of clay with porous skins and porous minds are quite incapable of the hermetic sealing that the strategy of “closure” seems to imply. The word completion is a truer word. Each experience has within it a dynamic of unfolding and a narrative of emergence. Oscar Wilde once said, “The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realized is right.” When a person manages to trust experience and be open to it, the experience finds its own way to realization. Though such an ending may be awkward and painful, there is a sense of wholesomeness and authenticity about it. Then the heart will gradually find that this stage has run its course and the ending is substantial and true. Eventually the person emerges with a deeper sense of freedom, certainty, and integration.

The nature of calendar time is linear; it is made up of durations that begin and end. The Celtic imagination always sensed that beneath time there was eternal depth. This offers us a completely different way of relating to time. It relieves time of the finality of ending. While something may come to an ending on the surface of time, its presence, meaning, and effect continue to be held into the eternal. This is how spirit unfolds and deepens.

John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

Noticing the extraordinary in the ordinary

July 19, 2012July 19, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and

seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves.

Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte, Everything is waiting for you

When busy, just take time to stop and notice

July 18, 2012July 18, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

In your life just take time to stop, just this sense of stopping and opening when you find yourself in that moment – “Oh I’m caught up, this thing, the next thing and the next thing” …… Just say to yourself “STOP” and relax and open – try to listen to the sound of silence.

And even if you can’t notice it, just that stopping just being caught in that momentum of busyness of compulsion…one thing to the next and one thought to the other – it’s a dualistic world, a conditioned world that we bind ourselves in – going from one thing to the other, until we get tired and go to bed – we get up and again we do this and we do that, running around one thing after the other…. Now, that is going from one condition to another…we get caught up in our own particular conditioning and programming – worry worry worry – meeting the deadline. It is always like this – this sense of feeling that there’s always something else, something I have to do, something that needs to be done!

So then the stopping and reflecting, just stopping and being the KNOWER of this feeling – not trying to suppress it but just recognise that compulsive momentum….. “its like THIS” …this feeling of rushing…of going onto the next thing – meeting the deadline, so much to do, so much pressure, its like THIS. Now staying with that, even for a moment is better than not doing it at all – not just being a helpless victim of compulsive habits, until you burn out and break down. It’s like running a motor car until it just breaks down, not reading the signs. This is your life – don’t be intimidated by it or just become a victim of habits.

Ajahn Sumedho

We are not our moods…

July 17, 2012July 18, 2012 Karl Duffy3 Comments

Mindfulness practice, as it deepens, is a practical way of relating to thoughts, of working with difficult emotions – especially as they present in body sensations – and finally, and maybe most crucially, a way of relating to our sense of self. One way this may be helpful, in a pragmatic way of dealing with the up’s and down’s of each day, is to continually define ourselves in a fluid, on-going, non-fixed sense, understanding life, as it were, as always being born in each moment. We try to bring attention to these continual little births, seeing how an event or moment gives birth to a new emotion and is followed by a new thought (or more likely, a re-hashing of familiar, old patterns of thought). Rather than allowing that thought take hold, identifying with it and making it part of our story, we can let it pass through. Rather than attaching some of our identity to these moments, and the narrative that accompanies them , we can hold ourselves lightly, not limiting ourselves to the moods we experience or the judgmental thoughts they generate. In this way we can develop a sense of ease as we no longer feel the need to defend the “self” created by them.

Once we are able to perceive that there is change only, and that we ourselves are part of the change, there is no longer anything to possess, no me to possess, no such things as possession. Moreover, I can understand that the impulses that torment me have no more solidity and fixity than any other event. If anger, for instance, were to possess any independent, real existence, then I would be faced with a great problem, for it would existing me apart from other internal or external causes, a constant personality defect with which I would have to cope. However, since anger is a momentary state arising from conditions and then subsiding because of other conditions, when it is gone, it is really gone, extinct. I am thus not intrinsically an angry person, nor a good person, or any other kind of person.

Francis Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism

Seeing the freshness in each moment

July 17, 2012July 16, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

How we relate to the dynamic flow of energy is important. We can learn to relax with it, recognizing it as our basic ground, as a natural part of life; Or the feeling of uncertainty, of nothing to hold on to, can cause us to panic, and instantly a chain reaction begins. Our energy and the energy of the universe are always in flux, but we have little tolerance for this unpredictability, and we have little ability to see ourselves and the world as an exciting, fluid situation that is always fresh and new. Instead we get stuck in a rut – the rut of “I want” and “I don’t want,” . . . the rut of continually getting hooked by our personal preferences.

Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap

No other day but this

July 16, 2012July 14, 2012 Karl Duffy1 Comment

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

Henry David Thoreau