Tag: Awareness

Inside, not out

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Finding a refuge to come home to

Each one of us has a place to live, be it Ireland, France, Switzerland or the USA. And each of us has a set of current circumstances with which to live. These are our “plots of land”. It is by working with things as they are that we are challenged to find contentment

As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found – in himself.

Erich Fromm

Reacting or responding?

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No matter what the situation is,
we are responsible for our own mind states

Joseph Goldstein

A pure space of bare attention

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File:2007-07-09Aquilegia01.jpgWe have never, not for a single day, the pure space before us, in which flowers
unendingly burst open.

It is always world and never nowhere without no:
that pureness, that unwatched, which one breathes and
endlessly knows and never wants

Rilke, Duino Elegies

Noticing the flower

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Flowers_growing

What flower will we miss today, because we wish we were elsewhere or think we have something “better” to do?

One day the Buddha held up a flower in front of an audience of 1,250 monks and nuns. He did not say anything for quite a long time. The audience was perfectly silent. Everyone seemed to be thinking hard, trying to see the meaning behind the Buddha’s gesture. Then, suddenly, the Buddha smiled. He smiled because someone in the audience smiled at him and at the flower.

To me the meaning is quite simple. When someone holds up a flower and shows it to you, he wants you to see it. If you keep thinking you miss the flower. The person who was not thinking, who was just himself, was able to encounter the flower in depth, and he smiled. That is the problem of life. If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything.

Thich Nhat Hanh,  Peace Is Every Step

 

Knowing the mental energies

Karl Duffy4 Comments

storm-sailingMany people fail to distinguish between their true nature and their personality traits, particularly their less desirable traits. The fact is you are not the worst characteristics of your personality. It is the nature of the untrained mind to want what it perceives as advantageous and to fear or hate what seems painful. Discovering how your heart and mind can work together to use these feelings allows you to move beyond them. You may feel overwhelmed by the circumstances of your present life or bound by past traumatic events. Again, this is a failure in perception. They are just mind-states which can be known. They can be seen as impermanent and not belonging to you and, therefore, they do not ultimately define your true nature.

Philip Moffitt

What we label today

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Label

The only reality we know is our concept of it.

Life is nothing till we call it something, and this is where mind training comes in.

Through it we learn to hold our concepts loosely, particularly those that allow unhelpful emotions to take over and cause us problems.

Karuna Cayton, The Misleading Mind