Tag: Acceptance

Just being aware today

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This is what we mean when we use such terms like: ‘It is as it is.’ If you ask someone who is swimming in water, ‘What is water like?’, then they simply bring attention to it and say, ‘Well, it feels like this. It’s this way.’ Then you ask, ‘How is it exactly? Is it wet or cold or warm or hot. ..?’ All of these words can describe it. Water can be cold, warm, hot, pleasant, unpleasant.  The realm we’re swimming in for a lifetime is this way! It feels like this! You feel it! Sometimes it’s pleasant. Sometimes it’s unpleasant. Most of the time it’s neither pleasant nor unpleasant. But always it’s just this way. Things come and go and change, and there’s nothing that you can depend on as being totally stable.

Now we’re not judging it; we’re not saying it’s good or it’s bad, or you should like it, or you shouldn’t; we’re just bringing attention to it – like the water. The sensory realm is a realm of feeling. We are born into it and we feel it. We feel hunger; we feel pleasure; we feel pain, heat, and cold. As we grow, we feel all kinds of things. We feel with the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, the body; and with the mind itself. There is the ability to think and remember, to perceive and conceive. All this is feeling. It can be lots of fun and wonderful, but it can also be depressing, mean and miserable; or it can be neutral – neither pleasant nor painful. To be able to truly reflect on these things, you have to be alert and attentive. Some people think that it is up to me to tell them how it is: ‘Ajahn Sumedho, how should I be feeling right now?’ But we’re not telling anybody how it is; we’re being open and receptive to how it is. There’s no need to tell someone how it is when they can find out for themselves.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Way it is

Being happy in our life

Karl Duffy3 Comments

“Rejoice always.” 1 Thess 5:16

It is not fitting, when one is in God’s service, to have a gloomy face or a chilling look. – St. Francis of Assisi

Last Sunday was the third Sunday of Advent, which is known as Gaudete Sunday –  from the Latin word Gaudete, meaning “rejoice”. The season of Advent originally was a fast of forty days in preparation for Christmas, starting the day after the feast of St. Martin (12 November), and was called “St. Martin’s Lent” from as early as the fifth century. This Sunday was a break from the penitential atmosphere in that it focused on joy because the coming celebration was near. There seems to be a number of fundamental themes occurring in all cultures around this time of year, reflecting deep anthropological or archaic desires. One of them is the desire to keep hope and joy alive in the face of shortening days. We can see this theme expressed as hope, patience and looking forward in the Christian season,  due initially to the belief in the immanent return of Jesus. Nowadays the injunction becomes an inner wisdom, directing us to notice what is good and not stay with the mind’s habitual tendency to struggle and focus on what is negative. It also points us towards finding true contentment with how our life is actually at this moment. Practically this means that we cultivate the practice of joy, smiling at the beauty we see each day and being grateful for the good things we receive. Not taking ourselves too seriously, but keeping light and unforced,  is also a useful practice, as the Thich Nhat Hahn quote this morning said,  and as Chesterton reminds us here:

Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Seriousness is not a virtue. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.

When meditation is like watching television

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You have to learn the correct spirit of sitting. If you make a lot of effort when you sit, you become tense and that creates pain all over your body. Sitting should be pleasant. When you turn on the television in your living room, you can sit for hours without suffering. Yet when you sit for meditation, you suffer. Why? Because you struggle. You want to succeed in your meditation and so you fight. When you are watching television you don’t fight. You have to learn to sit without fighting . If you know how to sit like that, sitting is very pleasant. When Nelson Mandela visited France he was asked what he like to do the most. He said that because he was always busy, what he liked to do the most was just to sit and do nothing. Because to sit and do nothing is a pleasure – you restore yourself. The problem is not to sit or not to sit, but how to sit.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Be Beautiful, Be Yourself, Shambala Sun

Where we focus the mind

Karl Duffy1 Comment


Sometimes a lot of our thoughts and feelings can be connected with what we do not have, or by what has been done to us. The mind seems to have a great desire to hold on to things or events,  and this is the same no matter if the experience is positive or negative. We can see this when we find ourselves remembering negative words spoken years ago, or encounter people holding decades-old grudges. If we focus on what we do not have, we frequently  compare our condition to other more “desirable” conditions.  And when we look at our life in terms of what did not work out for us, we can feel a deep sense of lack and go on to cultivate a profound sense of dissatisfaction. However, if we are spending ongoing time noticing what we have lost or do not have, rather than what we actually have, it is clear that, paradoxically, it is not truly lost, but is still present and recurring in a transformed form, to remind us or even haunt us with its presence. Meditation is essentially a practice of de-grasping- of working with a mind that likes to push away or hold onto reality – by patiently sitting with conditions as they actually are. 

Losing too is still ours;
and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.

When something’s let go of, it circles;
and though we are rarely the center of the circle,
it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.

Rilke, For Hans Carossa

Finding our confidence within

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When we are well with ourselves, then whatever happens, it really doesn’t matter, because we have equilibrium and stability. We don’t feel any lack of confidence.

If not, we’re always on edge, waiting to see how someone reacts to us, what people say to us or think about us. Our confidence hangs on what people tell us about how we are, how we look, how we behave.

When we are really in touch with ourselves, we know ourselves beyond what others may tell us. So these three qualities – a good heart, stability, and spaciousness – these are really what you could call basic human virtues.

Sogyal Rinpoche

Active waiting

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Waiting is not popular. In fact, most people consider waiting a waste of time. Perhaps this is because the culture in which we live is basically saying, “Get going! Do something! Show you are able to make a difference! Don’t just sit there and wait!” For many people, waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they want to go. And people do not like such a place.  

But there is none of this passivity in Scripture. Those who are waiting are waiting very actively. They know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they are standing. That’s the secret. The secret of waiting is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something has begun. Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening. A waiting person is a patient person. The word “patience” means the willingness to stay where we are and life the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there. That, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control.

Henri Nouwen, A Spirituality of Waiting