Tag: Acceptance

On forgiveness and not holding grudges

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

I heard a story about a golfer who was awarded a check for winning a tournament, and when he was walking to the parking lot a woman came up to him and told him a heart-wrenching story about her sick child. She told him that if the child didn’t get help soon, he would die. The golfer promptly signed his check over to the woman. A month later one of the golfer’s buddies told him that he heard about what happened in the parking lot and that he also heard that the woman was a con artist and didn’t even have a sick child. The golfer replied, “That’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time — a child isn’t going to die.”

The golfer obviously did not get caught in the fear of betrayal that would have led him to feel mistreated, and to consequently harbor resentment toward the woman. If he had taken the path of bitterness, no doubt many people would have agreed with him. But instead, he was able to listen to the voice of the heart, the heart that is naturally concerned with the welfare of others, rather than the hard-hearted habit of holding grudges.

It may be easy for us to be kind, and also forgiving, when life is going well. But it’s only when life gets difficult that the depth of our practice is revealed. For our kindness to be real, it can’t depend on how others treat us, or on how we feel at any given moment. Truthfully, when we feel mistreated, kindness is often the farthest thing from our minds and hearts. Yet, for genuine happiness to be possible, we ultimately have to go to that deep place within us where true kindness and forgiveness can be accessed. This means we must attend to whatever blocks access to our hearts.

Ezra Bayda, Beyond Happiness, The Zen Way to True Contentment.

Sunday Quote: Being comfortable in our own skin

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

 

If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path.

Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation

Accepting our nature…

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Carl Jung had a few years when he suffered from some type of illness, which meant that he withdrew from teaching at university and found himself unable to read any serious scientific literature. He also was unable to write much during that time. However, this outward inactivity led him to a very important interior realization, which is close  to what we work at in mindfulness practice each day  – to accept the “conditions of existence” as we simply see them. It seems to be a strange psychological truth, affirmed by him and by Carl Rogers, that when we accept something in this gentle way, shifts begin to occur and change happens more easily. Being fully open to whatever is happening means that we can let go of fear and control and of our tendency to place demands on this moment, insisting that it be other than it is:

Something else, too, came to me from my illness. I might formulate that it was an affirmation of things as they are: an unconditional “yes” to that which is, without subjective protests – acceptance of the conditions of existence as I see them and understand them, acceptance of my nature, as I happen to be.

Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections

The most profound teaching

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

What I encourage is a moving towards simplicity, rather than complexity. We’re already complicated personalities. Our cultural and social conditioning is usually very complicated. We’re educated and literate, which means that we know a lot and have much experience. This means that we are no longer simple. We’ve lost the simplicity we had as children and have become rather complicated characters. What is most simple is to wake up…it’s as simple as that. The most profound teaching is the  phrase “wake up”.  Hearing this, one then asks, “What am I supposed to do next?” We complicate it again because we’re not used to being really awake and fully present. We’re used to thinking about things and analyzing, trying to get something or get rid of something; achieving and attaining. In awakened awareness there is no grasping. It’s a simple, immanent act of being here, being patient. It takes trust, especially trust in yourself. 

Ajahn Sumedho, The Sound of Silence

Letting the breath be

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We are all breathing. The first instruction is just to know that we are, not in an intellectual sense, but to be aware of the simple sensation of, the in-breath and the out-breath. Even in this instruction we are learning something extremely important, to allow the breathing follow its own nature, to breath itself. We are not trying to make the breath simple or keep it shallow. We are seeing how it is.That flies in the face of our lifelong conditioning to control, direct and orchestrate everything. We’re terrified of chaos, afraid that if we don’t keep things in their place they will all fall apart. Most of us are quite good at controlling, and what we’d really like is to be even better at it. Our tendency is to ride the breath, push it along, help it out…..

That isn’t the instruction. The instruction is to let it be, to surrender to the breathing. We are learning even in this first instruction the art of surrender.

Larry Rosenberg, Breath by Breath

Life is continually changing

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

No matter how much we want it to be otherwise, the truth is that we are not in control of the unfolding of our experiences. Despite our search for stability and prediction, for the center of our lives to hold firm, it never does. Life is wilder than that – a flow that we cannot command or stave off. We can affect and influence and impact what happens, but we can’t wake up in the morning and decide what we will encounter and feel and be confronted by during the day.

Sharon Salzberg, Faith.