Tag: Awareness

Sunday Quote: Taking time

Karl Duffy1 Comment

 

 

All this hurrying soon will be over. 

Only when we slow down do we touch the holy.

Rilke

Staying open on this day

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Often the busyness of our lives can lead us to forget the inner vision or the real reason why we set out on our journey in the first place. We can lose our sense of creativity and joy as we constantly react to the shape which our days impose upon us. Staying open to this space –  to our vision for our lives, to a deeper place of meaning, to nourishing the inner places of joy –  is a challenge as we face deadlines and the demands for success. How do we keep in touch with our true inheritance today?

In that first hardly noticed
moment to which you wake,
coming back to this life
from the other more secret,
moveable and frighteningly
honest world where everything began,
there is a small opening
into the new day
which closes the moment
you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light of the morning
window toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you to your
one love?  What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow and spread
its branches against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open and lovely
white page on the waiting desk?

David Whyte, What to remember when Waking

Working with all parts of our life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

If God is right there in the midst of our struggle, then our aim is to stay there.  We are to remain in the cell, to stay on the road, not to forego the journey or forget the darkness. It is all too easy for us to overlook the importance of struggle, preferring instead to secure peace and rest, or presuming to reach the stage of love prematurely. It is always easier to let things pass by, to go on without examination or effort. Yet, struggling means living. It is a way of fully living life and not merely observing it. It takes much time and a great  effort to unite the disparate, disjointed and divided parts of the self into an integrated whole. 

John Chryssavgis, In the Heart of the Desert

Seeing with fresh eyes

Karl Duffy1 Comment

As Mary Oliver reminded us yesterday, how we look and  pay attention is crucial in our work in counterbalancing the mind’s tendency to focus on the negative. So our day-to-day practice is to notice with fresh eyes, and not allowing our beliefs about what we “know” get in the way of the richness of moment-to-moment experience. We can try this today with the people we meet and when we are in familiar situations.

No moment is the same as any other. Each is unique and contains unique possibilities. Beginner’s mind reminds us of this simple truth. The next time you see somebody who is familiar to you, ask yourself if you are seeing this person with fresh eyes, as he or she really is, or if you are seeing only the reflection of your own thoughts about this person.

Jon Kabat Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living

Noticing colour in grey days

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Some similar thoughts, this time from a poet and not a neuroscientist. She encourages us to notice the little moments of colour that come into every day as a way of going against the heart’s tendency to close in on itself:

Red bird came all winter firing up the landscape as nothing else could.
Of course I love the sparrows, those dun-colored darlings so hungry and so many.
I am a God-fearing feeder of birds.
I know He has many children,
not all of them bold in spirit.
Still, for whatever reason —
perhaps because the winter is so long
and the sky so black-blue,
or perhaps because the heart narrows
as often as it opens —
I am glad
that red bird comes all winter
firing up the landscape
as nothing else could.

Mary Oliver, Red Bird

Taking in the good things that happen

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Some writers state that this is the week when people find their mood low, as the excitement of Christmas and New Year fades and they find that not much has actually changed in their lives. It does not seem that there is much scientific findings for their claim – indeed the term ” Blue Monday”, coined for the first day of the week, seems to have come from a Travel Agency’s campaign to get us to book our summer holidays around this time. That being said, there does seem to be good scientific support for the brain’s tendency to focus on the difficult things in our lives and remember or amplify them. Because of that, this week and every week,  we have to consciously work against that leaning, both by becoming familiar with  our negative stories and by practicing the way we pay attention.

Here is one good way of doing that, outlined by Rick Hanson, the author of the excellent Buddha’s Brain. Sincere thanks to regular reader Kathy at http://pocketperspectives.wordpress.com/ for bringing this series of videos to my attention.