Tag: Awareness

How to work with worry

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When unresolved energies begin to bubble up and flood the heart, they project onto circumstances in the external world. One’s thoughts can acquire tremendous drama, concocting scenarios that carry flavors such as passion or despair – and then spin the heart.

So we have to use breathing to gather those energies in, catch mind-stuff as it begins to trickle – or rush – out. Investigate: “How does this feel?” “This is the quality of worry.” And where in your body is that? Breathe through that, where in your felt body is the insecurity or worry? Breathe through that, extending compassionate attention. Energies may run out into desire fantasies. Where in your body is that craving, lust, passion? Breathe, cool, steady that in your body. Tackle them at the source rather than as the vivid blossoms of people, events, past and future that they create.

Catch them, handle their energy – and breathe through it.

Ajahn Sucitto

A different nourishment

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Do not ask
for flowery perfume
when I can give you
fruits of autumn

Do not reject nourishment
because winter is at the door
and already the old saints
have raised their brows
to contemplate eternity
We children of the moment
drink up the last of the wine.

Lalla Romana, 1906 – 2001 Italian poet

Meaning comes later

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The blog passed 800,000 hits. Thank you all for your continued support.

We must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before.

It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life.

It doesn’t necessarily have to involve an out-of-body experience during surgery, or the sort of high-level magic that the new age hopes to press on us. It’s more a sensitivity…. the concept that there are other forces at work. A more reverential way of living.

James Hillman

The life you have got

Karl Duffy1 Comment

You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, but you mustn’t wish for another life.

The chance you have is the life you’ve got.

You mustn’t want to be somebody else.

What you must do is this: Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.

Wendell Berry

Where to start

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

I don’t tell the murky world
to turn pure.
I purify myself
and check my reflection
in the water of the valley brook.

Ryoken, 1758–1831, Zen monk and poet

The river will flow

Karl Duffy2 Comments

When we fall utterly, something gathers us up. But our falling must be without reservation, without expectation, without hope, though not hopeless. You can’t plan that kind of falling. When you abandon yourself utterly to life, the river will flow, and the log jam will free. Impossible is another word for grace. Who would’ve thought it, life takes another turn, and you are gathered up into a whole different way of seeing and being.

Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Change Your Life