Tag: Acceptance

A true friend to yourself

Karl Duffy2 Comments

hug4

You build inner strength through embracing the totality of your experience, both the delightful parts and the difficult parts. Embracing the totality of your experience is one definition of having loving kindness for yourself. Loving kindness does not mean making sure you’re feeling good all the time – trying to set up your life so that you’re comfortable every moment. Rather, it means setting up your life so that you have time for meditation and self-reflection, for kindhearted, compassionate self-honesty. In this way you become more attuned to seeing when you’re biting the hook, when you’re getting caught in the undertow of emotions, when you’re grasping and when you’re letting go. This is the way you become a true friend to yourself just as you are, with both your laziness and your bravery. There is no step more important than this.

Pema Chödron

What meditation is really about

Karl Duffy1 Comment

¨File:India - Sights & Culture - 031 - welcome puja (2458852328).jpg

These are the things we can contemplate. We can’t control what arises in the mind, but we can reflect on what we are feeling and learn from it rather than simply being caught helplessly in our impulses and habits. Even though there is a lot in life that we can’t change, we can change our attitude towards it. That’s what so much of meditation is really about — changing our attitude from a self-centered, “get rid of this or get more of that” to one of welcoming life as it is. Welcoming the opportunity to eat food that we don’t like. Welcoming wearing three robes on a hot morning. Welcoming discomfort, feeling fed up, wanting to run away. This way of welcoming life reflects a deeper understanding. Life is like this. Sometimes it’s very nice, sometimes it’s horrible, and much of the time it’s neither one way nor the other. Life is like this.

Ajahn Sumedho

photo of welcoming ritual in India by mckay savage

The role of confusion

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:WinterFog.jpg

Dull and misty morning in Ireland today, obscuring the landscape and making things that were visible yesterday seem less clear.  A good metaphor for how our inner life can seem at times.

Confusion is seen as a mistake, even a madness.

In truth, our potential for psychological growth reveals itself in moments of disruption.

The gift of confusion must be honored to clear a space in your life for something new to claim you.

Jerry Ruhl, Director,  Jung Center, Houston

photo of fog in the Wicklow mountains by sarah777

Fixed views

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Changing the places.JPG

Problems arise depending on how fixed our ideas are, or how “attached ” we are to a particular vision of what a “good life” means. Is it a certain lifestyle or income, and is our role to provide that for our family? If so, then if something gets in the way of our earning enough o achieve this lifestyle, we will suffer. If ones identity is attached or stuck to a particular role…then disappointment, depression, anger and shame will arise if we can’t live up to it. Remember, everything in life is changing, impermanent.

Karuna Cayton, The Misleading Mind

photo Artur Andrzej

Sunday quote: Wasting time in comparisons

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

rest

Do not wish to be anything but what you are

and try to be that perfectly.

St Francis de Sales

Moving toward wholeness, not perfection

Karl Duffy4 Comments

This part of Ireland has quite a lot of interesting early Christian remains,   so last weekend I visited the ruins of the monastic settlement in Castledermot.  It is a site which is left somewhat untended, so that the crosses and tombs have a certain craggy beauty in a natural setting.  Rough stones, some seeming unfinished.  And yet, unfinished or ongoing does not mean “not right”, much as we tend to prefer tidyness and a clear direction or order.  We often think we have to be the finished product, or have everything resolved and clear, so that other people will give us the feedback that we are doing OK.  Seeing this “lack of completion” reminded me of these words from  Jung  – which echo the idea from Pema Chodren posted last Friday. We never really arrive at “perfection” (even though the mind thinks in terms of it) but rather at a wholeness which is more like a continual “coming together and falling apart”.  When we give up that notion of  the idealized life we wish we had, we allow ourself to work with the life we actually have.  Each moment may not be perfect, but it is, in some way, complete.

The realization of the self….leads to a fundamental conflict, to a real suspension between opposites …and to an approximate state of wholeness that lacks perfection. . . . The individual may strive after perfection . . . but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness.

Jung, Christ, A Symbol of the Self,

photo of ancient Celtic cross Castledermot, Ireland, taken from dialogue ireland website.