Tag: Awareness

….Time for others

Karl Duffy3 Comments

AnamChara : Soul Friendship

Being able to focus on the other person rather than the text you just received has become the new fundamental requirement for having a relationship with that person. If you go to a restaurant these days, for instance, you see people sitting together, at the same table, staring at their video screens, their phone, their iPad, or whatever it may be — and not talking to each other. That’s become the new norm. And what it means is that the connection is being damaged to some extent — threatened by the fact that we’re together, but we’re not together. We’re alone together.

Daniel Goldman, Is Attention the Secret to Emotional Intelligence

Waking up

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gift1

All of us know how difficult it is for us to be inside the present moment, to not be asleep to the real riches inside our own lives. The distractions and worries of daily life tend to so consume us that we habitually take for granted what’s most precious to us, our health, the miracle of our senses, the love and friendships that surround us, and the gift of life itself. We go through our daily lives not only with a lack of reflectiveness and lack of gratitude but with a habitual touch of resentment as well, a chronic, grey depression, Robert Moore calls it. We are very much asleep, both to God and to our own lives.

Ron Rolheiser

A Christmas lesson: In the ordinary

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Proud mother, Kalaw.jpg

Nothing in life is trivial

Life is whole wherever and whenever we touch it,

and one moment or event is not less sacred than another

Vimala Thakar

Beannachtaí na Nollaig oraibh go léir

(Christmas blessings from Ireland to all of you who drop by or who read each day)

photo vera and jean christophe

Swept along by the mind

Karl Duffy3 Comments

allondon1

One point that becomes clear about the current of the mind is that whatever way it’s flowing, we tend to get bound up with it. We want to protect and sustain a happy state and feel bad about its eventual decline and disappearance; our identity gets based on that state. On the other hand we feel stuck with and desperate about unhappy states.  In its fullest sense, liberation …. is a liberation from cause and effect in the mind. It’s a process of mentally, emotionally, stepping back from any state and seeing it just as a state, without reactions and attitudes. This simple skill, which most of us do from time to time, is what we develop in … practice.  More radically, it means stepping out of the program that asserts that my life gets  fulfilled by having or being some state or another.

Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma

Light is within

Karl Duffy2 Comments

newgrange2345

I wish I could show you,

when you are lonely or in darkness

the astonishing light of your own being.

Hafiz

Light entering the burial chamber of Newgrange in Ireland at dawn on the Winter Solstice

Everything changes

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Hallway.ParHAdelaide.JPG

A quote from the new book by Joseph Goldstein, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, which is  a profound reflection on the Satipatthana Sutta, one of the foundational texts in mindfulness meditation. Here he suggests a practice to help us get a real understanding of impermanence, to see directly the truth of change and in that way gain a helpful perspective on how to deal with the ups and downs of a day:

When we pay attention, we see that everything is disappearing and new things are arising, not only every day or hour but in every moment. When we leave our house, or simply walk from one room to another, can we notice this flow of changing experience – the flow of visual forms as we move, different sounds, changing sensations in the body, fleeting thoughts or images? What happens to each of these experiences? Do they last? The truth of their changing nature is so ordinary that we have mostly stopped noticing it at all.

photo mx