Tag: Awareness

The depth beneath our thoughts.

Karl Duffy1 Comment

In 1929 the British Broad­casting Corporation decided to start broadcasting “live silence” in memory of the dead instead of just halting transmission for two minutes every day; it was important, it was felt, to hear the rustle of papers, the singing of the birds outside, an occasional cough. As a BBC spokesman put it, with rare wisdom, silence is “a solvent which destroys personality and gives us leave to be great and universal.” It permits us, in short, to be who we are and could be if only we had the openness and trust. A chapel is where we hear something and nothing, ourselves and everyone else, a silence that is not the absence of noise, but the presence of something much deeper: the depth beneath our thoughts.

A chapel is where you can hear something beating below your heart.

Pico Iyer, Where Silence Is Sacred

A morning meditation

Karl Duffy2 Comments

I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Wave of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.

John O’Donohue, A Morning Offering

Sometimes out of reach

Karl Duffy1 Comment
What I most want is to spring out of this personality, then to sit apart from that leaping.  I’ve lived too long where I can be reached. Rumi

Our lives are often like over-packed suitcases. It seems like we are always busy, always over-pressured, always one phone call, one text message, one email, one visit, and one task behind. We are forever anxious about what we have still left undone, about whom we have disappointed, about unmet expectations. Moreover, inside of all of that, we can forever be reached. We have no quiet island to escape to, no haven of solitude. We can always be reached. Half the world has our contact numbers and we feel pressure to be available all the time. So we often feel as if we are on a treadmill from which we would want to step off. And within all that busyness, pressure, noise, and tiredness we long for solitude, long for some quiet, peaceful island where all the pressure and noise will stop and we can sit in simple rest. That’s a healthy yearning. It’s our soul speaking. Like our bodies, our souls too keep trying to tell us what they need.

[But]…Solitude is not something we turn on like a water faucet. It needs a body and mind slowed down enough to be attentive to the present moment. We are in solitude when….we fully taste the water we are drinking, feel the warmth of our blankets, and are restful enough to be content inside our own skin. We don’t often accomplish this, despite sincere effort, but we need to keep making new beginnings.

Ron Rolheiser, Longing For Solitude

From dawn to dusk, compete and yet not

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Light filters through tinted windows over a set of stairs at United Evangelical Lutheran Church on Sunday, March 25, 2012, in Swiss Alp , Texas. ( Smiley N. Pool / Houston Chronicle ) Photo: Smiley N. Pool, Staff / © 2012 Houston ChronicleAs the house of a person
in age sometimes grows cluttered
with what is too loved or too heavy to part with,
the heart may grow cluttered.
And still the house will be emptied,
and still the heart.

As the thoughts of a person
in age sometimes grow sparer,
like a great cleanness come into a room,
the soul may grow sparer;
one sparrow song carves it completely.
And still the room is full,
and still the heart.

Empty and filled,
like the curling half-light of morning,
in which everything is still possible and so why not.

Filled and empty,
like the curling half-light of evening,
in which everything now is finished and so why not.

Jane Hirshfield, (extract), Standing Deer

Importance in the ordinary

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The ordinary arts we practice every day at home

are of more importance to the soul

than their simplicity might suggest

Thomas Moore

How to work with negative thoughts today

Karl Duffy1 Comment

One of the biggest problems with thoughts is that we tend to believe everything they say: “If I am thinking it, it must be true.”I have learned that the best way to deal with excessive thinking is to just listen to it, to listen to the mind. Listening is much more effective than trying to stop thought or cut it off. When we listen there is a different mode employed in the heart. Instead of trying to cut it off, we receive thought without making anything out of it. When we look at thought in this way we aren’t being pulled into it. We can just look at it. We don’t reject it or suppress it, but we don’t buy into it either. We don’t make more out of it than is there. That attitude of listening, of opening to and receiving thought, has a liberating quality in-and-of itself.

Ajahn Amaro, Thinking