Tag: Awareness

Watching it pass by

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Man sitting on high hill and watching river down.jpg

Through mindfulness practice you began to experience how conditioned the world is and how these conditions constantly change. To free ourselves, we need to quieten the mind through some mindfulness in meditation. Then, instead of identifying with the changing conditions, we learn to release them and turn toward consciousness itself, to rest in the knowing. Ajahn Chah called this pure awareness, “the original mind,” and resting in “the one who knows.” We can be in the midst of an experience, being upset or angry or caught by some problem, and then step back from it and rest in pure awareness. We let go.

Jack Kornfield, This Fantastic, Unfolding Experiment

A time for silence

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Stillness (8093187857).jpg

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling in the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth. If we have no silence, God is not heard in our music.

Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

photo Helgi halldorsson

Enough space to hold

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:A blue sky.JPG

We do not meditate in order to be comfortable. In other words, we don’t meditate in order to always, all the time, feel good. I imagine shockwaves are passing through you as you read this, because so many people come to meditation to simply “feel better.” However, the purpose of meditation is not to feel bad, you’ll be glad to know. Rather, meditation gives us the opportunity to have an open, compassionate attentiveness to whatever is going on. The meditative space is like the big sky — spacious, vast enough to accommodate anything that arises.

Pema Chodron, 5 Reasons to Meditate

photo Thamizhpparithi maari

 

Sunday Quote: Grandeur

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Mount Kenya.jpg

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life

as in hoping for another life

and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Albert Camus

photo Håkon Dahlmo

Whole even if not perfect

Karl Duffy4 Comments

File:Contemporary wabi-sabi tea bowl.jpg

[Thomas] Merton taught me the importance of looking at life not merely in terms of either-or,  but also in terms of both-and. Paradoxical thinking is key to creativity, which comes from the capacity to entertain apparently contradictory ideas in a way that stretches the mind and opens the heart to something new. Paradox is also a way of being that’s key to wholeness, which does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life…..To be whole I have to be able to say I am both shadow and light.

Parker Palmer, A Friendship, A Love, A Rescue

photo wabi-sabi tea bowl by ottmarliebert

As they are

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Michel Comte exhibition.jpg

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

photo paul stocker