Category: Make the most of life

Opportunities

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Letting go is an important practice in everyday life, as well as on the path of liberation. Daily life provides innumerable small and large occasions for letting go of plans, desires, preferences, and opinions. It can be as simple as when the weather changes, and we abandon plans we had for the day. Or it can be as complex as deciding what to sacrifice, when pulled between the needs of family, friends, career, community, or spiritual practice. Daily life provides many situations where letting go is appropriate, or even required. Learning how to do so skilfully is essential to a happy life.

Gil Fronsdal

photo from Tiny Buddha

Fixed ideas

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Coming home

All the wars, all the hatred, all the ignorance in the world come out of being so invested in our opinions. And at bottom, those opinions are merely our efforts to escape the underlying uneasiness of being human, the uneasiness of feeling like we can’t get fixed ground under our feet. So we hold onto our fixed idea of this is how it is and disparage any opposing views. But imagine what the world would be like if we could come to see our likes and dislikes as merely likes and dislikes, and what we take to be intrinsically true as just our personal viewpoint.

Pema Chodron, Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change.

Tightening towards or receiving experience

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

When there’s something in the future that we’ve got to get to, there’s tension. Things start to solidify; flexibility begins to dwindle. When there’s a strong sense of self-consciousness-“I am this, I’m not that; I wasn’t that, I will be this” – then there’s a tightening of one’s energies. When we defend ourselves from people, events, memories, and feelings, when we shut things out there’s tightening and stress. When we try to perform and make ourselves into something, there’s tightening and stress. When we compare and compete, there’s tightening and stress. 

So we begin to contemplate these unwholesome patterns and relinquish them. We can see how our lives work in terms of compartments….We create zones in which anything unwanted or unusual has been weeded out. This in turn creates a very rigid feeling. When something gets slightly out of pattern, we feel confused or upset. This is no way to live…..As long as a line exists, there will be position-taking, nervousness, winning, losing, etc. Since experiences are transitory, there will always be a slight sense either of holding on to or getting rid of the state one has attained, trying to increase it or decrease it. Samadhi [Centering or concentration] occurs when we move over that line. There’s participation in and enjoyment of experience. And as one learns to trust, one receives the blessings of that: what is good, what is conducive to the heart’s welfare, what gives joy. Receiving joy is another way to say enjoyment, and samadhi is the art of refined enjoyment. It is the careful collecting of oneself to the joy of the present moment. Joyfulness means there’s no fear, no tension, no ought to. There isn’t anything we have to do about it. It’s just this.

Ajahn Sucitto, Samadhi is Pure Enjoyment

Beginning a journey

Karl Duffy1 Comment

There are journeys we have begun that have brought us great inner riches and refinement; but we had to travel through dark valleys of difficulty and suffering. Had we known at the beginning what the journey would demand of us, we might never have set out. Yet the rewards and gifts became vital to who we are. Through the innocence of beginning we are often seduced into growth.… When the heart is ready for a fresh beginning, unforeseen things can emerge. And in a sense, this is exactly what a beginning does. It is an opening for surprises. Surrounding the intention and the act of beginning, there are always exciting possibilities. … beginnings have their own mind, and they invite and unveil new gifts and arrivals in one’s life. Beginnings are new horizons that want to be seen; … What is the new horizon in you that wants to be seen?

John O Donohue

Sunday Quote: Doing and Non-Doing

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

 

This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking,

yet only seekers find it.

Abu Yazid Al-Bistami

Life flows on

Karl Duffy2 Comments

river 22No matter how much we want it to be otherwise, the truth is that we are not in control of the unfolding of our experiences. Despite our search for stability and prediction, for the center of our loves to hold firm, it never does. Life is wilder than that,  a flow we cannot command or stave off. We can affect and influence and impact what happens, but we can’t wake up in the morning and decide what we will encounter and feel and be confronted ny during the day. Invariably, when I finally think that I have gotten one aspect of myself under control, life intrudes forcefully to show me otherwise.

Sharon Slazberg, Faith