Tag: Awareness

A meditation exercise in times of transition

Karl Duffy4 Comments

Bring your awareness to focus on something in your life that is changing or ending or dying right now. Breathe gently as you consider whatever transition is most significant right now in your life. Note any feelings that arise – trepidation, excitement, resistance, anger, annoyance, or grief. Every time your feelings get the better of you, become aware of your breathing. Meet your troubled and contracted feelings with your calm and expansive breath. Breathe, sigh, and stretch out on the river of change. Remember times when you have resisted change in the past. Regard how things turned out in the end – maybe not how you thought they would or you wanted them to, but in the end, there you were. Wiser, stronger, still alive. Smile. Relax. Allow yourself to break open. Sit tall, with dignity and patience, watching your breath rise and fall, rise and fall. Pray for the courage to welcome this new change with openness and wisdom.

Then, open your eyes, go back into your life, and do what you have to do, but do it with grace, with hope, and with a lighter touch.

Elizabeth Lesser

Standing still?

Karl Duffy2 Comments

There is a problem in thinking that you are supposed to be advancing in your practice all the time. You don’t have to constantly be on the road. If you have a flat tire, that is also part of the journey. Ambition makes you feel that you are not doing anything. There seems to be a hypnotic quality to ambition and speed, so that you feel that you are standing still just because you want to go so fast. You might actually be getting close to your goal.

Chögyam Trungpa

Showing up in our lives

Karl Duffy2 Comments

One of the more difficult paradoxes to accept is that this abundance of gifts is always quietly present and that it is we who drift in and out of seeing it. The one recurring doorway to this vitality is our simple participation in life. When we slip into heartless watching, the abundance seems to vanish. When we dare to show up and be fully present, grace and wonder and mystery start to appear, even in the midst of pain. Not as planned dreams, or as images of lovers, or as scripts of success designed by our fantasies of ourselves. But as oddly shaped pods of vitality bursting to multiply and bring us further into the mystery of living.

Mark Nepo, The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live an Authentic LIfe

Sunday Quote: Taking time to refresh our vision

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When your eyes are tired the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own.

There you can be sure you are not beyond love.

David Whyte, Sweet Darkness

Simple instructions for staying present

Karl Duffy4 Comments

Remember to use your body as a vehicle for awakening. It can be as simple as staying mindful of your posture. You are probably sitting as you read this. What are the sensations in your body at this moment? When you…stand, feel the movements of standing, of walking to the next activity, of how you lie down at the end of the day. Be in your body as you move, as you reach for something, as you turn. It is as simple as that.

Joseph Goldstein, Insight Meditation

Self is a verb

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The practice of meditation invites us to investigate the flux of arising and passing events. When we get the hang of it, we can begin to see how each artifact of the mind is raised and lowered to view, like so many flash cards. But we can also glimpse, once in a while, the sleight-of-hand shuffling the cards and pulling them of the deck. Behind the objects lies a process. Self is a process. Self is a verb.

Andrew Olendzki, Unlimiting Mind