Tag: balance

We are more than what happens today

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Our awareness of our depth of being is fleeting. Yet just because we close our eyes doesn’t mean the sun has disappeared. And just because we can’t keep the unquestionable fact of being alive in view doesn’t mean that the inherent vitality of life has disappeared. We are more than what happens to us. We are more than what we think or fear. The turbulence we encounter is very real, but underneath what happens to us is the inherent, unwavering fact of life filling us from within. 

Mark Nepo, Our Authority of Being

Putting down the burden

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal center of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.  

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature.

Living with gaps

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We think we need to hold everything close….to know where everything is going.

But probably, in life, the most important skill to learn is….

There are poets who learn from you
to say, what you, in your aloneness, are;
and they learn through you to live distantness,
as the evenings through the great stars
become accustomed to eternity.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Girls

Resilience

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth.
Jane Hirshfield, Optimism

A Spacious mind

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

When there’s space in the mind, the mind relaxes, and we feel a simple sense of delight. We experience the possibility of living a life in which we are not continuously aggravated by emotions, discursiveness, and concepts about the nature of things…. Despite all the ups and downs of our life, we are fundamentally awake individuals who have a natural ability to become compassionate and wise. Our nature is to be cheerful. This cheerfulness is deeper than temporary conditions. The day does not have to be sunny for us to be cheerful.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Saturday: Choiceless patience

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach — waiting for a gift from the sea

Ann Morrow Lindberg,  Gift from the Sea