Category: Make the most of life

What is, is good enough.

Karl Duffy1 Comment

In both Western and Eastern traditions, happiness is less about feeling good than about an attitude of acceptance of life the way it is. Happiness comes from accepting what is , in contrast to pursuing what is not yet. To penetrate life means to get into it with a focused power and precision, like a laser beam. As Thoreau indicated, it means “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life”. If we truly practice his favorite principle –  less is more, simpler is better – we sooner or later come upon the subtler principle it reveals: what is,  is good enough.

 Less is more, simpler is better, works precisely because whatever exists without our inflating and overcomplicating it, is good enough. Zen alludes to this principle when it says  “The beauty of a mountain is that it is so much like a mountain, and of water, that it is so much like water”.  Simply stated, life is simply good.

Michael Gellert, The Way of the Small

Keeping our work in perspective

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One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown

is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

Bertrand Russell, British Philosopher.

Facing our past …..

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A central truth of practice is that in order to come to the present, we must go through the past. This does not mean we have to relive or analyse our childhood, but it does mean that when our attention steadies itself in the here and now, we will be met with the residue of our past conditioning. Awakening means exposing and investigating areas of this past conditioning where the sense-of-self remains identified within a pattern, thought or emotion.

Rodney Smith, Stepping out of Self Deception.

The paradox is indeed that new life is born out of the pains of the old.

Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out.

Facing our pain

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Some of us have a hard time believing that we are actually able to face our own pain. We have convinced ourselves that our pain is too deep, too frightening, something to avoid at all costs. Yet if we finally allow ourselves to feel the depth of that sadness and gently let it break our hearts, we may come to feel a great freedom, a genuine sense of release and peace, because we have finally stopped running away from ourselves and from the pain that lives within us.

Wayne Muller, Legacy of the Heart

Opening to the soul in ordinary life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The three days of the Easter Festival contain a number of beautiful rituals  which have been celebrated  by human beings for thousands of years. These rituals  touch of the big themes of human life –  loss and death, betrayal and loyalty, meaning and love –  and do so in a way that  allow us ways to share significant emotions with others. The city of Geneva was quiet this morning, as it has been the last  few days.  It is good to have seasons and rhythms in our lives, periods of less activity with time to celebrate with family and friends.  These celebrations  can become familiar rituals in our lives – they bring us together and allow us to connect, and through connection find support and meaning. They open us up to something which is beyond the rush of each day and the limitations of work:

Ritual maintains the world’s holiness. Knowing that everything we do, no matter how simple, has a halo of imagination around it and can serve the soul enriches life and makes the things around us more precious, more worthy of our protection and care. As in a dream a small object may assume a significant meaning, so in a life that is animated with ritual there are no insignificant things. When traditional cultures carve elaborate faces and bodies on their chairs and tools, they are acknowledging the soul in ordinary things, as well as the fact that simple work is also ritual. When we stamp out our mass-made products with functionality blazoned on them but no sign of imagination, we are denying ritual a role in ordinary affairs. We are chasing away the soul that could animate our lives.

Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

How to be serene

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All the world religions and wisdom traditions come to the same conclusion: True contentment comes about through  working out, through the twists and turns of one’s own life, a personal understanding of these deeply different realities.

For whoever has learned to love,

for whoever has learned to suffer,

life is imbued with serene beauty

Br Roger