Tag: Awareness

Seeing today for the first time

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P1000461Do not say, ‘It is morning,’
and dismiss it with a name of yesterday.
See it for the first time
as a newborn child that has no name.

Every child comes with the message
that God is not yet discouraged of man.

Everything comes to us that belongs to us
if we create the capacity to receive it.

Faith is the bird that feels the light
when the dawn is still dark.

From the solemn gloom of the temple
children run out to sit in the dust,
God watches them play and forgets the priest.

I have become my own version of an optimist.
If I can’t make it through one door,
I’ll go through another door – or I’ll make a door.
Something terrific will come
no matter how dark the present.

Rabindranath Tagore

How we name our experiences

Karl Duffy3 Comments
A lot of our difficulties comes from the “name” we put on our experiences, how we label what is happening to us. This applies particularly to how we talk to ourselves in the moments that something is occurring, as this Sutta from the Buddhist tradition tells us:
Name has weighed down everything
Nothing is more extensive than name.
Name is the one thing that has
All under its control

S. 1.61

Being where you are

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When snow falls and slows down the traffic,  we get plenty of opportunities to practice mindfulness, here explained in its simplest form. Often our way is blocked and we are forced to stay where we are for a long time.  Being with our life “as it is” is the key to our practice, even when we don’t particularly want to be there:

You don’t need to try to get anywhere when you practice meditation. You only need to really be where you already are and realize it (make it real). In fact in this way of looking at things there is no place else to go, so efforts to get anywhere else are ill-conceived. They are bound to lead to frustration and failure. On the other hand, you cannot fail to be where you already are. So you cannot ‘fail’ in your meditation practice if you are willing to be with things as they are.

Jon Kabat Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living

On staying open today

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assisi cloisterA lot of the time we practice with what we don’t know, rather than what we do. Some situations in life, or in our day, are not clear. Our practice is to hold open a space, not rushing the answer, allowing the situation or the person to go through the necessary process at its own pace.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.
Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

 Erich Fromm

Each day has its challenges and difficulties

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DSCN0245The meditation orientation is not about fixing pain or making it better. It’s about looking deeply into the nature of pain — making use of it in certain ways that might allow us to grow. In that growing, things will change, and we have the potential to make choices that will move us toward greater wisdom and compassion, including self-compassion, and thus toward freedom from suffering.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, At Home in our Bodies.

We become our choices

Karl DuffyLeave a comment
You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief, the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness, clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.
 
Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live, each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.
 
This rebus – slip and stubbornness, bottom of river, my own consumed life –
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.
 
As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues, this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.
 
The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.
 
How can I enter this question the clay has asked?
Jane Hirshfield,  Given Sugar, Given Salt
Image taken from http://www.videojug.com