Tag: Awareness

False fear

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The mind creates a lot of the dramas in our lives, often making them more frightening than they actually are.

Most of us, in some way, struggle with fear — instinctually tensing against it or becoming overwhelmed by it. Shifting our relationship with fear is central to the evolution of consciousness. While fear is a natural, intelligent emotion, when it goes into overdrive, we are in a trance that contracts our body, heart and mind. Our resistance to fear sustains this trance and perpetuates our suffering. As we learn to attend to fear with mindfulness and care, its grip loosens, and we reconnect with our full aliveness, wisdom and love.

Tara Brach

We are more than what happens to us

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Our awareness of our depth of being is fleeting. Yet just because we close our eyes doesn’t mean the sun has disappeared. And just because we can’t keep the unquestionable fact of being alive in view doesn’t mean that the inherent vitality of life has disappeared. We are more than what happens to us. We are more than what we think or fear. The turbulence we encounter is very real, but underneath what happens to us is the inherent, unwavering fact of life filling us from within.

Mark Nepo, The One Life We’re Given: Finding the Wisdom That Waits in Your Heart

Unchanging essence

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

There is something, prior to heaven and earth,

Without form, without sound, all alone by itself.

It has the power to control all the changing things;

Yet it does not change itself through the course of the four seasons.

Fu Ta-shih, c 497 AD

Sunday quote: How we grow

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Just as a snake sheds its skin,

so we should shed our past, over and over again

Jack Kornfield, Buddha’s Little Instruction Book

Not knowing….

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The essential religious experience is that you are being “known through” more than knowing anything in particular yourself. Despite this difference, it will feel like a true kind of knowing. But it is also a freedom not to have to know!

Richard Rohr, The Naked Now

Looking at the wind

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When we recognize and become grounded in awareness of awareness, the “wind” of emotion may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward, watching the shifts and changes with the intention of becoming familiar with that aspect of consciousness that recognizes Oh, this is what I’m feeling, this is what I’m thinking. As we do so, a bit of space opens up within us. With practice, that space — which is the mind’s natural clarity — begins to expand and settle. We can begin to watch our thoughts and emotions without necessarily being affected by them quite as powerfully or vividly as we’re used to. We can still feel our feelings, think our thoughts, but slowly our identity shifts from a person who defines him – or herself as lonely, ashamed, frightened, or hobbled by low self-esteem to a person who can look at loneliness, shame, and low self-esteem as movements of the mind.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Aim of Attention