Category: Make the most of life

Release from effort

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:AutumnLeaf2.JPG

Remind yourself to loosen up your opinions about what you think you are doing or where you think you are going. This is a practice that can be done informally, with regular reminders to yourself throughout the day. Or you can do a formal ‘wandering’ practice: Sitting in an upright posture, allow yourself to be with your breath, your body and all your sense perceptions, thoughts and emotions. You can notice how all these experiences come and go, as long as you don’t try to hold onto any of them. This is a practice of release from effort, and allows a sense of peace and not-knowing to arise naturally.

Melissa Myozen Backer Roshi in Richard Fields, A Year of Living Mindfully

 photo: brookie

Where to let go

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Flickr - law keven - Make a Wish....jpg

A big change in the Irish weather these last few days. Wet and very windy,  and consequently the leaves are finally giving up their clinging and letting go. It prompts me to reflect on whether a certain lightness in how I hold some things –  like how I turn my opinions into a solid identity  or how I try to fix  into a definite storyline as to how a meeting or a process should turn out,  how I like things fixed in a world that is always changing  –   can reduce some of the emotional charge which arises from time to time.

Every year, everything
I have ever learned in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side is salvation,

whose meaning none of us will ever know.
To live in this world you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods

How do we arrive at non-agitation through non-clinging? When the instructed person does not regard form with these words: “This is mine, this I am, this is my self.”

The form of his changes and alters, but with the change and alteration of form, sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure and despair do not arise.

The Buddha, S 22.8
photo keven law

The different sides of wonder

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Vallee de Valserine

Everything has its wonders,

even darkness and silence,

and I learn, whatever state I may be in,

therein to be content.

Hellen Keller

With thanks again to Ellen for the photo

Sunday quote: The heart’s capacity

Karl Duffy5 Comments

File:Pair of birch leafs.jpg

Mindfulness meditation doesn’t change life.

Life remains as fragile and unpredictable as ever.

Meditation changes the heart’s capacity to accept life as it is.

Sylvia Boorstein

photo mate2code

Roots

Karl Duffy1 Comment

tree roots wood

The rooting (of trees, of our selves) is as important and as necessary as the rising. We have the opportunity to sink roots into soul and rise up with branches in heaven…..Growth is meant to go in both directions, toward the fertile darkness and the glorious light, each of us having the opportunity to bridge earth and heaven — the underworld and the upperworld — through the trunks of our middleworld lives…. There’s no conflict between spirit-centered being and soulful doing, between transcendence and inscendence. Each supports and enhances the other. Like Rilke, we discover we can have both:

You see, I want a lot
Maybe I want it all;
The darkness of each endless fall,
The shimmering light of each ascent.

Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft

Autumn work

Karl Duffy10 Comments

File:Field of Pumpkins.jpg

A brief moment of reflection and gratitude. The blog started its sixth year this week. We recently passed 300,000 visits and over 1500 people who follow each day. As I have said before,  I try to keep it simple –  looking for words or ideas that help mindfulness meditation practice  without me getting in the way too much,  and hoping that they  touch one or two readers in the same way as they help me. Thank you all so much for visiting.  As Autumn deepens, we reflect and move on:

Here in Ireland the Gaelic word for October is Deireadh Fomhair, which means the “last harvesting” of what was planted earlier in the year. The weather system has changed these past few days,  the leaves have started to fall in earnest, and it is clearer to see how Autumn signals a change in energy, a winding-down,  as all of nature – and that includes us – prepares for the different tempo and darker days  of winter. So we can use it as a season to find our balance  between our past and our future,  as our focus naturally turns more inward. We can use it as a time to look back on the work we have done this year, the way we have expended our energy. We can use it to take stock of what we are investing in and harvesting in our lives. Or we can use it to wind down and create space, recognizing the unwise busyness that only creates more anxiety in our minds, keeping us running a lot,  but sometimes just making us feel more empty.

Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity,

so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.

Sogyal Rinpoche

photo Jeff Borden