Tag: Be fully present

A flash of lightning

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A lot of thunderstorms these days in Ireland

The Buddha often used images to try to convey some of this sense of all appearances arising, with nothing we can hold on to. He said life is like a rainbow, an echo, a dream, a drop of dew on a blade of grass, a flash of lightning in a summer sky.

What does a deeper glimpse into this truth of change offer us, ultimately? We see that there is a tender, exultant beauty to every hour, in fact to every minute we have just because we are alive. ..The fragility and dynamism of life is what makes it so vital. Every experience, every encounter, every realized desire, and every unfulfilled longing that comes into our lives is moving, changing…

Life is short, and it is sacred

Sharon Salzberg, Real LIfe: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom

Sunday quote: A holistic life

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A mind all logic is like a knife all blade,

it makes the hand bleed that uses it

Rabindranath Tagore, 1861 -1941, Indian poet, writer and philosopher

Build your own

Karl Duffy5 Comments

This is where we run into trouble in terms of being fulfilled… You have to make your own happiness, wherever you are.

Your job isn’t going to make you happy, your spouse isn’t going to make you happy, the weather isn’t going to make you happy… You have to decide what you want, and you have to find that way of doing it, whether or not the outside circumstances are going to participate in your success… You have to be able to create your own happiness, period.

Jonathan Fields, American author, in interview with Debbie Millman on the GoodLIfe Project

Being with what is

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At any moment, whatever we are experiencing, only one of two things is ever happening: either we are being with what is, or else we are resisting what is.

Being with what is means letting ourselves have and feel our experience, just as it is right now. …

This is where genuine creativity, health, and communication, as well as spiritual power, arise from.

John Welwood

Finally, instructions for life

Karl Duffy8 Comments

We waste a lot of time seeking someone to tell us what life will be like once we live it. We drain ourselves of inner fortitude by asking others to map our way.

At the end of all this stalling, though, we each have to venture out and simply see what happens. 

The instructions are in the living,

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

To know what one really needs

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows ‘what he wants,’ while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.

In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom