Tag: Be fully present

Confronting change

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Our lives ask us to die and be reborn every time we confront change – change within ourselves and change in our world. When we descend all the way down to the bottom of a loss, and dwell patiently, with an open heart, in the darkness and pain, we can bring back up with us the sweetness of life and the exhilaration of inner growth. When there is nothing left to lose, we find the true self — the self that is whole, the self that is enough, the self that no longer looks to others for definition, or completion, or anything but companionship on the journey. This is the way to live a meaningful and hopeful life — a life of real happiness and inner peace.

Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open

We make up our life moment by moment

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Some brain-science thoughts giving the same message as yesterday’s meditation one…

Instead of seeing the brain as rigid, fixed in mode, programmed like a computer, there is now a much more biological and powerful notion of “experiential selection,” of experience literally shaping the connectivity and function of the brain.

But how then do our frames, our momentary moments, hold together? How, if there is only transience, do we achieve continuity? Our passing thoughts, as James says ( in an image which smacks of cowboy life in the l880’s) do not wander round like wild cattle. Each one is owned, our own, and bears the brand of this ownership, and each thought, in James’ words, is born an owner of the thoughts that went before, and “dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor.

We come around to Proust’s image, itself slightly reminiscent of photography…..that we consist entirely of “a collection of moments,” even though these flow into one another like Borges’s river.

Oliver Sachs, In the River of Consciousness

At home

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When we can be centered in ourselves,

even for brief periods of time in the face of the pull of the outer world,

not having to look elsewhere for something to fill us up or make us happy,

we can be at home wherever we find ourselves,

at peace with things as they are, moment by moment.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Complaining

Karl Duffy3 Comments

See if you can catch yourself complaining in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge.

When you complain, you make yourself a victim.

Leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.


 Eckhart Tolle

Sunday Quote: Joy in an incomplete world

Karl Duffy1 Comment

This morning,  thousands rose early to catch the birdsong at dawn in an annual celebration entitled “Dawn Chorus Day” which went out live on radio from locations all over the world

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer,

it sings because it has a song.

 Maya Angelou

No plans

Karl Duffy1 Comment

There must be a time of day when the man who
  makes plans forgets his plans,
  and acts as if he had no plans at all.

 There must be a time of day when the man who has
 to speak falls very silent.
 And his mind forms no more propositions,
 and he asks himself:
 Did they have a meaning?

 There must be a time
 When the man of prayer goes to pray
 as if it were the first time in his life
 he had ever prayed,
 when the man of resolutions puts his
 resolutions aside
 as if they had all been broken,
 and he learns a different wisdom:

 distinguishing the sun from the moon,
 the stars from the darkness,
 the sea from the dry land,
 and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.

Thomas Merton