Tag: Acceptance

We always want something different

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Suffering is the desire for more choices than reality offers, but reality is without options. Our mind creates mental alternatives when there are none in reality, and we do so by bargaining with reality through our desires and fears. The sense-of-self comes into play when we think that reality can be altered. As we consider the options we take ourselves out of the state of abiding within the moment into acting on the moment. When the moment becomes adversarial, we become self invested and determined to do something about it. This creates a sense of someone being on one side and reality being on the other, as if life was happening to us.

Rodney Smith, Stepping out of Self-Deception

A work in progress

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Self-actualization is not a sudden happening or even the permanent result of long effort. The eleventh-century Tibetan Buddhist poet-saint Milarupa suggested: “Do not expect full realization; simply practice every day of your life.” A healthy person is not perfect but perfectible, not a done deal but a work in progress. Staying healthy takes discipline, work, and patience, which is why our life is a journey and perforce a heroic one.

David Richo, How to be an Adult in Relationships

Becoming the person you have always been

Karl Duffy2 Comments

With twenty-one words, carefully chosen and artfully woven,  May Sarton evokes the quest for vocation – at least, my quest for vocation – with candor and precision:

Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people’s faces.

What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity – the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.It is a strange gift, this birthright gift of self. Accepting it turns out to be even more demanding than attempting to become someone else!

Parker Palmer, Let your Life Speak

Welcome to being you

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You will have many ideas about what meditation is supposed to be and your experience in meditation will not match your ideas. You will believe that the important point is to get your experience to match your ideas of what your experience should be like. When you are unable to do this you will say that meditation is difficult. You will be ready to give up. But when you can just sit, having the experience you are having, whatever it is, without comparing it to what it should be, you will have true ease. No longer busy with chasing after some imagined perfection, you rest in the moment. You “own” your body and your mind….This is called “No more worry about not being perfect”. Welcome to being you.

Edward Espe Brown, Zazen: The Practice of Freedom

Becoming calmer and calmer

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When you are practicing….. do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything. It appears as if something comes from outside your mind, but actually it is only the waves of your mind, and if you are not bothered by the waves, gradually they will become calmer and calmer.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

Holding the contradictions within

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Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves. Sanctity in such an age means, no doubt, traveling from the area of anxiety to the area in which there is no anxiety or perhaps it may mean learning….to be without anxiety in the midst of anxiety. Fundamentally, as Max Picard points out, it probably comes to this: living in a silence which so reconciles the contradictions within us that, although they remain within us, they cease to be a problem.

Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude