Category: Make the most of life

Not always struggling with our sadness

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

As I have written before, modern society is not very comfortable with any nuances in happiness.  It invariably prefers to portray people’s lives as always happy and show that successful people have gotten it all together. There is  no real place for  a narrative that contains moments of struggle or periods when less obvious forms of growth are nurtured. This can mean that we fall in to the trap of interpreting all sadness or mundane moments as an indication that we are doing something wrong, or that our life is on the wrong track. Frequently we fail to see that a lot of the models presented to us are not valid representations of our lives. And many images we see can easily turn into thoughts of an idealized future where we will be happier, thinner, more popular, and these thoughts may undermine the place we are actually called to be. This can be especially present in the weeks after Christmas and New Year,  moments that some people find tough and when the media is full of  strategies, advice and initiatives to improve our life and achieve greater success. A different strategy is cultivated in mindfulness practice, based on staying close to where we actually are, acknowledging that a sense of groundlessness or loneliness is normal in humans,  and that part of practice is learning to sit with this.

If we are feeling unhappy, what is called for is a willingness to simply be with that unhappiness. If we’re not careful, we say something’s wrong, though it doesn’t really help to say that. We say it either inwardly or outwardly. This projecting of blame is a consequence of having made an inner mistake of misperceiving our unhappiness, sadness or suffering as being something wrong. We don’t receive it just as it is. We don’t acknowledge it and feel it, allowing it to happen; we don’t have the ‘knowingness’ to see it as activity taking place in awareness.  Because we don’t have that perspective, we struggle to do something about our suffering, to deal with it in some way. To say that something has gone wrong and that it’s somebody’s fault is a heedless way of dealing with our unpleasant experiences. The habit of consistently doing this is a symptom of what I call the compulsive judging mind.

Ajahn Munindo

The Beauty in the cracks

Karl Duffy1 Comment
The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. Hemingway

Most of us are trying to live an authentic life. Deep down, we want to take off our game face and be real and imperfect. There is a line from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” that serves as a reminder to me when I get into that place where I’m trying to control everything and make it perfect. The line is, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” So many of us run around spackling all of the cracks, trying to make everything look just right. This line helps me remember the beauty of the cracks (and the messy house and the imperfect manuscript…). It reminds me that our imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together. Imperfectly, but together.

Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

Admitting we all struggle from time to time

Karl DuffyLeave a comment
Learn the alchemy true human beings know.  The moment you accept what troubles you’ve been given, the door will open. Rumi

The irony of hiding the dark side of our humanness is that our secret is not really a secret at all. How can it be when we’re all safeguarding the very same story? That’s why Rumi calls it an Open Secret. It’s almost a joke — a laughable admission that each one of us has a shadow self — a bumbling, bad-tempered twin. Big surprise! Just like you, I can be a jerk sometimes. I do unkind, cowardly things, harbor unmerciful thoughts, and mope around when I should be doing something constructive. Just like you, I wonder if life has meaning; I worry and fret over things I can’t control; and I often feel overcome with a longing for something that I cannot even name. For all of my strengths and gifts, I am also a vulnerable and insecure person, in need of connection and reassurance. This is the secret I try to keep from you, and you from me, and in doing so, we do each other a grave disservice.

Rumi tells us that moment we accept what troubles we’ve been given, “the door will open.” Sounds easy, sounds attractive, but it is difficult, and most of us pound on the door to freedom and happiness with every manipulative ploy save the one that actually works. If you’re interested in the door to the heavens opening, start with the door to your own secret self. See what happens when you offer to another a glimpse of who you really are. Start slowly. Without getting dramatic, share the simple dignity of yourself in each moment—your triumphs and your failures, your satisfaction and your sorrow. Face your embarrassment at being human, and you’ll uncover a deep well of passion and compassion. It’s a great power, your Open Secret. When your heart is undefended you make it safe for whomever you meet to put down his burden of hiding, and then you both can walk through the open door.

Elizabeth Lesser, The Open Secret


Opening to the new year in front of us

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When we can establish an embodied openness, it’s a relief to have the personal world replaced with clear open space. When the movie of who we are turns off, there’s just the open mystery – and that’s wonderful. That’s how you really wake up; life is most alive when you can be present at the edge of the unknown. Death, separation, uncertainty – they’re all part of life……We have the original potential to handle, and in fact blossom, in the face of these. We don’t have to feel threatened, anxious, needy or inadequate. With wise openness, the main causes and conditions for human misery cease.

The gates to the good life are open. It’s only because we place so much emphasis on knowing what can’t be known – like the future (you can’t even know the next moment) and how other people are – that we close them. But when all is uncertain, all is possible. In such a light, wise openness is the most obvious faculty to develop, because the unknown is right here within and around us.

Ajahn Sucitto, Original Openness.

A Path with Heart

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you . . . Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself alone, one question . . . Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t it is of no use.

Carlos Casteneda.

We set out on the road to freedom when we no longer let our compulsions or passions govern us. We are freed when we begin to put justice, heartfelt relationships, and the service of others and the truth over and above our own needs for love and success or our fears of failure and of relationships. To be free is to know who we are with all that is beautiful, all the brokenness in us; it is to love our values, to embrace them, and to develop them; it is to be anchored in a vision and a truth but also to be open to others and so, to change. Freedom lies in discovering that the truth is not a set of fixed certitudes, but a mystery we enter into, one step at a time. It is a process of going deeper and deeper into an unfathomable reality.

In this journey of integrating our experiences and our values, and of what we might learn as we listen to others, there may be a period of anguish. We need to find links between the old and the new, links that will permit the integration of new, consciousness-expanding truths into what we already know and are living –  our existing certitudes. As human sciences develop and the world evolves, we are called to grow into a new and deeper understanding of the Source o the universe and of life. As we participate in this, our sense of the true expands. Freedom is to be in awe of this Source, of the beauty and diversity of people, and of the universe. It is to contemplate the height and breadth of all that is true.

Jean Vanier, Becoming Human

Distracting ourselves

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Thomas Merton once said that the biggest spiritual problem of our time is efficiency, work, pragmatism; by the time we keep the plant running there is little time and energy for anything else.  Neil Postman suggests that, as a culture, we are amusing ourselves to death, that is, distracting ourselves into a bland, witless superficiality.  Henri Nouwen has written eloquently on how our greed for experience and the restlessness, hostility, and fantasy it generates, block solitude, hospitality, and prayer in our lives.  They are right.

What each of these authors, and countless others, are saying is that we, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion.  It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens.  We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church.  Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.

Ron Rolheiser, The Holy Longing.