Tag: balance

Using difficulties

Karl Duffy4 Comments

Hard times are not a mistake. You haven’t done something wrong to have hard times….. life is woven with praise and blame and gain, and loss and pleasure, and pain and disrepute for all of us. And those constantly change. 

So the spiritual life is not about avoiding loss and blame and difficulty

but taking those difficulties that come to us and using them to awaken a wise and free and compassionate heart no matter what.

And often it’s in the very difficulties that the greatest freedom comes to us.

Jack Kornfield, Difficult Times and the Crystal of Liberation

Happy

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Whenever you are offended, it’s usually because your self-image has not been worshiped or it has been momentarily exposed. The false self will quickly react with a vengeance to any offenses against it because all it has is its own fragile assumptions about itself.  Don’t waste much time defending your ego. The True Self is untouchable, or as Paul puts it “it takes no offense” (1 Corinthians 13:5). People who can live from their True Selves are genuinely happy. 

Richard Rohr, The Illusion of an Autonomous Self

…and artichokes

Karl Duffy2 Comments
Even
a small purple artichoke
boiled
in its own bittered
and darkening
waters
grows tender,
grows tender and sweet
patience, I think,
my species
keep testing the spiny leaves
the spiny heart
Jane Hirshfield, My species

….Caterpillars

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

It’s only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.

Ram Dass

Sunday Quote: Beautiful

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart. 

 Blaise Pascal 

A motto for September

Karl Duffy1 Comment

More from Chuang Tzu, just to start the month in a Taoist frame of mind:

Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free.

Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing.

This is the ultimate.