Pay Attention

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Last Sunday, my friends and I spoke about the gift of learning to observe ourselves impartially. We spoke of using the constantly changing flow of sensory feeling in the body — keeping it simple, just knowing pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral in the body.  Breaking our experience down in this way — sunlight, pleasant, shadow, unpleasant – can help us glimpse the flowing, changing nature of our experience. But turning our attention to the moment-by-moment experience of the life of body can accomplish something much greater. It can help free us from an obsessive identification with a small, embattled self. It can be the key to living a much bigger life — a good life in the deepest sense.

Tracy Cochran, Pay Attention, for Goodness Sake

The recipe

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Of one thing I am pretty sure,’ he resumed, ‘that the same recipe Goethe gave for the enjoyment of life, applies equally to all work: “Do the thing that lies next you.” That is all our business. Hurried results are worse than none. We must force nothing, but be partakers of the divine patience…All haste implies weakness. Time is as cheap as space and matter.

George MacDonald (1824-1905), Scottish poet, novelist, and Minister, Robert Falconer

Sunday Quote: The only way

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Happiness and the cause of happiness can arise only through loving-kindness and insight into the nature of things. There is no other way.

Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche

Round and round

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On this ever-revolving wheel of being

The individual self goes round and round

Through life after life, believing itself

To be a separate creature – until

It sees its identity with the Lord of Love

And attains immortality in the indivisible Whole.

The Shvetashvatara Upanishad , ancient Sanskrit text, c 5th Century BCE

Just for a little while

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Just for a little while, stop thinking about all the problems, crises, tasks. everything that’s pulling and pushing on us.

Be in that quiet space.  

After all these years, some of us still need permission to let go.

Melody Beatty

The sun still shines

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A lot of wisdom in this:
The trick to having a happy life is to remember that it all comes down to what we ourselves make of the life we have. 

“The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so”, Ralph Waldo Emerson says, ” but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger and mosquitoes and silly people.”

Joan Chittister, O.S.B., American Benedictine nun.