Category: Make the most of life

The cycles in our lives

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Walking in the hills this morning and saw a neglected meadow full of buttercups. It is lovely to see some fields just left “idle”, for wild flowers to then bloom, open for the bees and the butterflies. We do not need to add much to nature, just to let it be and it provides. If left to itself it grows and is fruitful. A bit like our lives. Even when times are tough and seem barren, they grow back and produce fruit even more  abundantly than before – we just have to trust in a cycle which often we cannot see but which is not made up by any one event. It unfolds at its own pace, with its own wisdom. If we have the courage to allow it do so,  it will lead us to what really matters.

….by seeing the deeper meaning

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The real challenge that faces us as we go through this day is staying open: open to the mystery of others and of events we cannot fully understand, open to a deeper meaning in our lives, open to seeing our lives from a different vantage point than that of our fears:

Can you hold the door
of your tent
wide to the firmament?

Lao Tzu

What I want in my life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled –
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything –  that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Mary Oliver, The Ponds

All starts with thoughts

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Watch your thoughts, they become words.
Watch your words, they lead to actions.
Watch your actions, they create habits.
Watch your habits, they build your character.
Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.

Upanishads


Everything that happens today is a blessing

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It is not easy to be open to everything that happens in a day, either outside us or within us, still less to see them all as “blessings”. Here Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, reminds us to do so, maybe from the perspective of her work with people in the last moments of their lives, when they have let go of some of the things which assumed great importance during their lives. Her words remind us today that life has a richness to be experienced and is not just to be managed or gotten through. Every aspect of this day can teach us, if we have eyes to see.

Learn to get in touch with silence within yourself, and know that everything in this life has purpose.

There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Spring: On not becoming identified with passing experiences

Karl Duffy1 Comment

This  quote from the great Lama Gendun Rinpoche, reminds us to hold lightly  experiences we have had and not allow our identity be defined by some of the events in our history. The practice of meditation is really one of trying to let go and then trust that life will unfold in a bigger picture –  which is often not visible as we go through individual events.  We sometimes need to let go of a memory – an idea of how things were or should be –  in order to be fully present for what is here and now. We continue walking in the present until the mystery becomes clear.

Happiness cannot be found through great effort and willpower, but is already present, in open relaxation and letting go. Don’t strain yourself, there is nothing to do or undo. Whatever momentarily arises in the body-mind has no real importance at all, has little reality whatsoever. Why identify with, and become attached to it, passing judgment upon it and ourselves?