Tag: Awareness

How we grow and mature

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Healing does not mean that one will reach an end-point where all is clear and conflict free. How could we imagine that the attitudes of one stage of our life would be adequate for subsequent stages and altered realities? While it is the secret hope of the nervous ego to fix the world and make it more predictable and secure, all is in flux. Finding the secret sources of our distress, and being enlarged by the suffering of this conflict, is how we grow and mature. As Jung notes, “Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happiness”.  Our goal is not happiness, which is evanescent and impossible to sustain; it is meaning which broadens us and carries us toward our destiny

James Holllis, Creating a Life: Finding your Individual Path.

The winds in the trees, the sound of the stream

Karl Duffy1 Comment

No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. These pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence and peace that is “heard” when the rain wanders freely among the hills and forests. But what can the wind say when there is no hearer? There is then a deeper silence: the silence in which the Hearer is No-Hearer. That deeper silence must be heard before one can speak truly of solitude.

Thomas Merton, Preface to Japanese translation of Thoughts in Solitude

Trusting the deeper wisdom

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Whatever form of meditation you practice, it is in essence simply a method for detaching yourself from thinking (which tends to reinforce the egoic process) long enough for you to begin to trust this other, deeper intelligence moving inside you. It provides you with another way to think: from “beyond the mind” — which, incidentally, is what the word metanoia, usually translated as “repentance,” actually means.

 Cynthia Bourgeault,  Mystical Hope

Fully here, now

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It is not easy to be fully in the moment, every moment. What we notice is that we have a host of  thoughts,  ideas,  expectations, preconceptions, hopes and fears working as a filter between us and the moment  – or the person – that stands before us. The ability to be right-here-now is what we practice each day; the capacity to choose between the world in our heads or the real world before us. It is true that we rarely see the world, or another person, as they actually are, but we see them as we are in that moment. So in order to be right here with whatever is going on we need, in one sense, to empty ourselves, to create space. The best way to do that is to pause and focus your attention before beginning something, such as a new task,  or a meeting,  or indeed, a conversation. Take a few conscious breaths today before you begin something, to allow a gap to open and the mind to relax enough in order to have the  space to welcome.

If my eye is to receive an image, it must be free from all other images; for if it already has so much as one, it cannot see another, nor can the ear hear a sound if it be occupied with one already. Any power of receiving must first be empty before it can receive anything.

John Tauler, 14th Century German mystic and preacher.

A simple truth to remember today

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The quality of our experience,

Moment by moment,

Will determine the quality of our lives

Matthieu Ricard

The Bigger Picture

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Often we do not know what is really going on. Our perspective can barely accommodate another person’s point of view, no less the forward march of evolution or the eternal mind of God.

Better to admit not knowing and to relax in the mystery of life than to try to force our minds where they can’t go.

Elizabeth Lesser