Learned helplessness

Karl Duffy1 Comment

It is good to remember that …there is a part of you that has always said yes. There is a part of you that is Love itself, and that is what we must fall into. It is already there. Once you move your identity to that level of deep inner contentment, you will realize you are drawing upon a Life that is much larger than your own and from a deeper abundance. Once you learn this, why would you ever again settle for scarcity in your life? “I’m not enough! This is not enough! I do not have enough!” I am afraid this is the way culture trains you to think. It is a kind of learned helplessness. The Gospel message is just the opposite — inherent power.

Richard Rohr

In the present

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Move through life living from one moment to the other,

wholly absorbed in the present,

carrying with you so little from the past that your spirit could pass through the eye of a needle;

as little distracted by the worries of the future as the birds of the air and the flowers of the field.

Anthony de Mello

Sunday quote: Complete and incomplete

Karl Duffy1 Comment

To understand nothing takes time.

Zen saying

The rarest wildflowers

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I dream of a quiet man
who explains nothing and defends 
nothing, but only knows 
where the rarest wildflowers 
are blooming, and who goes, 
and finds that he is smiling 
not by his own will.

Wendell Berry,  from Given

Belonging and not belonging

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Interestingly, we belong to life as much through our sense that it is all impossible, as we do through the sense that we will accomplish everything we have set out to do. This sense of belonging and not belonging is lived out by most people through three principal dynamics: first, through relationship to other people and other living things; second, through work; and third, through an understanding of what it means to be themselves, discrete individuals alive and seemingly separate from everyone and everything else.

David Whyte, The Three Marriages

Ready for anything

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My teacher Suzuki Roshi would say, “Sitting meditation is to practice being ready for anything.”

Being ready for anything is different than gearing yourself up

to defend or to attack things as they come toward you.

You sit, and you’re ready for anything.

Edward Espe Brown, The Most Important Point