Category: Make the most of life

Self-help, anxiety and the pressure to get better

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I was in Dublin yesterday and took advantage by visiting the Hodges Figgis bookshop on Dawson Street, which I had not seen for a good number of months. I looked around the psychology  section and then sought out books on meditation, which I found spread across religion, and the ever-growing sections of “popular psychology”,  “Mind, Spirit and Body” and  “Self-Help”. One or two things struck me as I browsed. There is a real risk of making terms like “mindfulness” completely meaningless  as the state of mindfulness (which seems to increasingly simply mean an easy to develop calm  state or present-moment attention) is applied to all types of areas without a similar focus on the daily practice of mindfulness needed to slowly discover its benefits, or on the underlying vision of society and ethics which give it life.  A second problem is that it becomes part of an overall dissatisfaction with ourselves which is very prevalent today and leads us to find books which will help us create a  better version of ourself.  There are even more reasons now to be unhappy with myself – I am not only not rich enough, or not successful enough but I am also not mindful enough to get either.  The danger with this is that it sometimes only increases our dissatisfaction with who we actually are, and the sometimes, less exciting place, our lives are. Sometimes these versions of ourselves and the ideal how-we-would like-to-be can come from the way Western society places an emphasis on achievement and can take us away from the person we actually are.  We set up a juxtaposition between the “I” am now and the “I” I should be and believe that this is a good thing.  However, in many cases this type of  self-help and even spiritual practice can eventually increase our self of inadequacy. We have just shifted the method but we remain within the dynamic of winning and losing unless we begin to tackle the underlying cause and effect.  Instead of always moving on,  our practice can ask us at times to stay with what we have. It is there that we work out the unique person we are meant to be. It reminded me of Rabbi Zusya’s words,  a short while before his death : “In the world to come I shall not be asked, ‘Why where you not Moses?’ I shall be asked, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’

Fixed views

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Changing the places.JPG

Problems arise depending on how fixed our ideas are, or how “attached ” we are to a particular vision of what a “good life” means. Is it a certain lifestyle or income, and is our role to provide that for our family? If so, then if something gets in the way of our earning enough o achieve this lifestyle, we will suffer. If ones identity is attached or stuck to a particular role…then disappointment, depression, anger and shame will arise if we can’t live up to it. Remember, everything in life is changing, impermanent.

Karuna Cayton, The Misleading Mind

photo Artur Andrzej

A special calling…to be ourselves

Karl Duffy4 Comments

File:GalwayCorrib gobeirne.jpg

In the Ireland of my youth the word “vocation” was quite frequently heard, something which is not so common today. It could refer to jobs which required self-sacrifice and dedication, such as nursing or relief work abroad. However, it most frequently meant that you felt called to serve God in ministry in the Church.  As such it had a special, mysterious quality, almost as if taking you by surprise, from without. While the understanding of life in the context of a deeper purpose and meaning is quite beneficial psychologically, there was a danger of seeing vocation as something reserved for special people. In this quote, Parker Palmer, reminds us that becoming fully who we are, wherever we are at this moment, and not running away from it through regret or living in our thoughts, is the real way of finding purpose in life. It is not by looking elsewhere, but by accepting and inhabiting who and where we are.

What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been. How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity — the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.

I first learned about vocation growing up in the church. But the idea of vocation I picked up in those circles created distortion until I grew strong enough to discard it. I mean the idea that vocation, or calling, comes from a voice external to ourselves, a voice of moral demand that asks us to become someone we are not yet — someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach.

Today I understand vocation quite differently — not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice ‘out there’ calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.

Parker Palmer, “Now I Become Myself,”

photo Old man, Ballyknow Quay,  Galway, Ireland, by Greg O’Beirne

The normal way is not the way home

Karl Duffy3 Comments

A short piece on change and the unknown, by the Irish poet and writer John O Donohue:

The greatest friend of the soul is the unknown. Yet we are afraid of the unknown because it lies outside our vision and our control. We avoid it or quell it by filtering it through our protective barriers of domestication and control. The normal way never leads home.

Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns. Now you realise how precious your time here is. You are no longer willing to squander your essence on undertakings that do not nourish your true self; your patience grows thin with tired talk and dead language. You see through the rosters of expectation which promise you safety and the confirmation of your outer identity. Now you are impatient for growth, willing to put yourself in the way of change. You want your work to become an expression of your gift. You want your relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells. You want your God to be wild and to call you to where your destiny awaits.

The Question Holds the Lantern

pilgrims climbing Croach Patrick,  July 28, 2013

Identity and the true self

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File:Croagh Patrick, the saddle on the western flanks - geograph.org.uk - 605872.jpg
 
If you plan on being anything less
than your true self
You will probably be unhappy
all the days of your life
 
A. Maslow.
 
photo : Croach Patrick, Ireland’s Holy Mountain.

Moving toward wholeness, not perfection

Karl Duffy4 Comments

This part of Ireland has quite a lot of interesting early Christian remains,   so last weekend I visited the ruins of the monastic settlement in Castledermot.  It is a site which is left somewhat untended, so that the crosses and tombs have a certain craggy beauty in a natural setting.  Rough stones, some seeming unfinished.  And yet, unfinished or ongoing does not mean “not right”, much as we tend to prefer tidyness and a clear direction or order.  We often think we have to be the finished product, or have everything resolved and clear, so that other people will give us the feedback that we are doing OK.  Seeing this “lack of completion” reminded me of these words from  Jung  – which echo the idea from Pema Chodren posted last Friday. We never really arrive at “perfection” (even though the mind thinks in terms of it) but rather at a wholeness which is more like a continual “coming together and falling apart”.  When we give up that notion of  the idealized life we wish we had, we allow ourself to work with the life we actually have.  Each moment may not be perfect, but it is, in some way, complete.

The realization of the self….leads to a fundamental conflict, to a real suspension between opposites …and to an approximate state of wholeness that lacks perfection. . . . The individual may strive after perfection . . . but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness.

Jung, Christ, A Symbol of the Self,

photo of ancient Celtic cross Castledermot, Ireland, taken from dialogue ireland website.