Tag: balance

Replacing our myths

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Society today prides itself at times at having thrown out some of the outdated myths that guided our forefathers and grandparents. We have progressed and base ourselves on more rational forces now. However, we are always guided by some myths, whether we are aware of it or not. We simply replace one philosophy by another, and worship in a different type of temple.

The collective fantasies of the modern world are that the old myths can be revived by acts of will, or that by acts of will new myths will be generated. While we have suffered the loss of the old, tribal myths, by and large,  we cannot generate new ones – though for sure many have tried. We transfer the need for the experience of the transcendent onto persons, objects, and causes and wonder why they disappoint.

Another way of putting this is that when the gods are not experienced inwardly, they will be projected outwardly. The energy we project onto the things of our world – objects, causes, ideologies, relationships – possess a kind of autonomy, for they momentarily carry spirituality for us. As Jung warns “Our consciousness only imagines that it has lost the gods; in reality they are still there and it only needs general conditions to bring them back in full force”.  Whenever the level of personal attention is lowered…the tendency of the ego to project what is not addressed in the inner life increases its fascination with the outer.

James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

Opening to the sacred in each moment

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Pause practice can transform each day of your life. It creates an open doorway to the sacredness of the place in which you find yourself. The vastness, stillness, and magic of the place will dawn upon you, if you let your mind relax and drop for just a few breaths the storyline you are working so hard to maintain. If you pause just long enough, you can reconnect with exactly where you are, with the immediacy of your experience.

When you are waking up in the morning and you aren’t even out of bed yet, even if you are running late, you could just look out and drop the storyline and take three conscious breaths. Just be where you are! When you are washing up, or making your coffee or tea, or brushing your teeth, just create a gap in your discursive mind. Take three conscious breaths. Just pause. Let it be a contrast to being all caught up. In any moment you could just listen. In any moment, you could put your full attention on the immediacy of your experience. When you are completely wound up about something and you pause, your natural intelligence clicks in and you have a sense of the right thing to do. This is part of the magic: our own natural intelligence is always there to inform us, as long as we allow a gap. As long as we are on automatic pilot, dictated to by our minds and our emotions, there is no intelligence. It is a rat race. So, what is the most important thing to do with each day? With each morning, each afternoon, each evening? It is to leave a gap.

Pema Chodron

Not waiting until everything is perfect

Karl Duffy1 Comment

It’s odd in a way, this business of Perfect Christmasses. The story of the first Christmas is the story of a series of completely unplanned, messy events – a surprise pregnancy, an unexpected journey that’s got to be made, a complete muddle over the hotel accommodation when you get there… Not exactly a perfect holiday.

But it tells us something really vital. We try to plan all this stuff and stay in charge, and too often (especially with advertisers singing in our ears the whole time) we think that unless we can cook the perfect dinner, plan the perfect wedding, organise the perfect Christmas, we somehow don’t really count or we can’t hold our heads up. But in the complete mess of the first Christmas, God says, ‘Don’t worry – I’m not going to wait until you’ve got everything sorted out perfectly before I get involved with you. I’m already there for you in the middle of it all, and if you just let yourself lean on me a bit instead of trying to make yourself and everything around you perfect by your own efforts, everyone will feel a little more of my love flowing’.

Archbishop of Canterbury, Pause for Thought, BBC Radio 2.

Caring for oneself today

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times.  Thomas Merton

Obviously Merton wasn’t speaking about pathologically self-destructive behavior. Instead he was drawing our attention to the shadow side of normative, even seemingly positive, culturally approved behavior. He was referring to how we do great violence to ourselves simply in the manner in which we go about arranging our lives…

Philip Moffitt, Violence against Self

Every moment gives an opportunity

Karl Duffy1 Comment

There is no question that the real mindfulness teacher, and the real meditation practice, is life itself. Every moment is an opportunity to realign ourselves with the actuality of what is unfolding, however challenging or mundane, and thereby choose not lose ourselves in our interpretations and stories about what is going on. This is easier than you may think. It is also hugely liberating each time we make even a momentary gesture in that direction. And those moments, those conscious realigning gestures can add up to a different life, a more mindful and emotionally balanced life. Not only that: they can influence your future in ways that may be not only beneficial to you, but transformative. Because if you take care of this moment, now, with kindness and awareness, the next moment will be different because of your having taken care of this one, because of your gesture of sanity, trust, and balance.

Jon Kabat Zinn

When meditation is like watching television

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

You have to learn the correct spirit of sitting. If you make a lot of effort when you sit, you become tense and that creates pain all over your body. Sitting should be pleasant. When you turn on the television in your living room, you can sit for hours without suffering. Yet when you sit for meditation, you suffer. Why? Because you struggle. You want to succeed in your meditation and so you fight. When you are watching television you don’t fight. You have to learn to sit without fighting . If you know how to sit like that, sitting is very pleasant. When Nelson Mandela visited France he was asked what he like to do the most. He said that because he was always busy, what he liked to do the most was just to sit and do nothing. Because to sit and do nothing is a pleasure – you restore yourself. The problem is not to sit or not to sit, but how to sit.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Be Beautiful, Be Yourself, Shambala Sun