Tag: balance

Opportunities

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Frosted leaf - geograph.org.uk - 651482.jpg

There is a simple question that helps me to practice the second step of gratitude: “What’s my opportunity here?” You will find that most of the time, the opportunity that a given moment offers you is an opportunity to enjoy – to enjoy sounds, smells, tastes, texture, colors, and, with still deeper joy, friendliness, kindness, patience, faithfulness, honesty, and all those gifts that soften the soil of our heart like warm spring rain. The more we practice awareness of the countless opportunities to simply enjoy, the easier it becomes to recognize difficult or painful experiences as opportunities, as gifts.

David Steindl-Rast, Awake, Aware and Alert

photo alan murray-rust

Keeping watch

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Sterkenburg 02.jpg

More on thoughts as constructive or destructive, this time from an early Christian monk who was remarkable for his insights into processes of the mind or heart. His encouragement to be watchful of what thoughts we dwell on and resist negative,  self-critical,  ones, is very similar to one of the descriptions found in ancient texts of mindfulness as a gatekeeper,  and to exercises used in modern Cognitive Behavioural Therapy:

Be the guardian of your own heart and do not let any thought pass through without checking them! Ask each one of them: “Are you from our side or from that of those against us?“.  If they come from your own house, they will fill you full of peace, but if they come from your enemy they will stir up anger and agitate your emotions.

Evagrius Pontius, 345 – 399.

photo guus van der valk

Just like this

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Mosul-swimming.jpg

If you ask someone who is swimming in water, ‘What is water like?’, then they simply bring attention to it and say, ‘Well, it feels like this. It’s this way.’ Then you ask, ‘How is it exactly? Is it wet or cold or warm or hot…?’ All of these words can describe it. Water can be cold, warm, hot, pleasant, unpleasant… But it’s just like this. The realm we’re swimming in for a lifetime is this way! It feels like this! You feel it! Sometimes it’s pleasant. Sometimes it’s unpleasant. Most of the time it’s neither pleasant nor unpleasant. But always it’s just this way. Things come and go and change, and there’s nothing that you can depend on as being totally stable. [It’s] all energy and change and movement; all flux and flow.

Now we’re not judging it; we’re not saying it’s good or it’s bad, or you should like it, or you shouldn’t; we’re just bringing attention to it –  like the water.

Ajahn Sumedho

New Years Motto

Karl Duffy5 Comments

File:Waterfall Ventas Rumba - panoramio - Laima Gūtmane (simka….jpg

Zen pretty much comes down to three things –

Everything changes,

Everything is connected,

Pay attention.

 Jane Hirshfield

photo laima Gūtmane (simka…

Things moving on

Karl Duffy4 Comments

barrow

The end of 2015 sees dark rivers bursting their banks, and high winds blowing all before them. Everything in movement. We see what to hold onto and what to let go of.

Every year
everything I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation, whose meaning
none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go

Mary Oliver, Black Water Woods

photo of the River Barrow at Bagenalstown, December 30th.

Gaps

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Cheltenham Spa Station ... MIND THE GAP. (6191893794).jpg

The ‘law of white spaces’ is an important piece of universal legislation that we ignore at our personal and collective peril. The law states that it is the white space between the words on a page that make it readable. Or the silence between two musical notes. Or the rest between periods of action. Without periods of silence and non-action our words and our deeds jumble up into meaningless spirals of stress. We need a web of silence spread around the world just as extensively as the web of technology.

Laurence Freeman, Web of Silence