Tag: balance

Journeys

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. The swallows in full flight across the fields having made their long journey to nest here.

When you set off on a path, the first thing you do is surrender yourself to a greater power, for you will encounter things you will not understand. You will understand things only with your heart, and that can be a little frightening. For a long time, the journey will seem like a Dark Night, but then any search is an act of faith. But God, who is far harder to understand than a Dark Night, appreciates our act of faith and takes our hand and guides us through the Mystery.

Paolo Coelho, Brida

Healing

Karl Duffy1 Comment

As the Summer Solstice approaches….

Shamanic healing is not about fixing what has gone wrong.

It’s about growing a new body that heals, ages, and dies consciously.

Alberto Villoldo, 1949 -, Cuban psychologist and medical anthropologist, writer on the healing practices of the Amazon and the Andean shamans.

Our Solid selves

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Our whole world falls apart, and we’ve been given this great opportunity. However, we don’t trust our basic wisdom mind enough to let it stay like that. Our habitual reaction is to want to get ourselves back – even our anger, resentment, fear, or bewilderment. So we re-create our solid, immovable personality as if we were Michelangelo chiseling ourselves out of marble.

By becoming aware of how we do this silly thing again and again because we don’t want to dwell in the uncertainty and awkwardness and pain of not knowing, we begin to develop true compassion for ourselves and everyone else, because we see what happens and how we react when things fall apart. That awareness is what turns the sword into a flower. It is how what is seemingly problematic and unwanted actually becomes our teacher.

Pema Chodron, When Things fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Unbecoming

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Personal growth isn’t only about personal becoming. It is also a process of personal unbecoming. A process of letting aspects of our personality die away, acting as the fertile soil for the new and more mature version of us to emerge.

Connor Beaton, Men’s Work

Settled in the body

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Pay attention to those times when you feel like you are rushing. Rushing does not have to do with speed. You can rush moving slowly, and you can rush moving quickly. We are rushing when we feel we are toppling forward. Our minds run ahead of ourselves; they are out there where we want to get to, instead of being settled back in our bodies. The feeling of rushing is good feedback. Whenever we are not present, right then, in that situation, we should stop and take a few breaths. Settle into the body again. Feel yourself sitting. Feel the step of a walk. Be in your body.

The Buddha made a very powerful statement about this: “Mindfulness of the body leads to nirvana.” Such awareness is not a superficial practice. Mindfulness of the body keeps us present.
 

Joseph Goldstein, Transforming the mind, Healing the World

Too busy to live

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it.

Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn… Learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.

Seneca, On the Shortness of LIfe