Tag: Be fully present

Masks

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Everyone has a life that is different from the ‘I’ of daily consciousness, a life that is trying to live through the ‘I’ who is its vessel. This is what the poet knows and what every wisdom tradition teaches; there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions, and my true self. The soul is like a wild animal; tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.

Parker Palmer, Let your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

Complaining

Karl Duffy4 Comments

Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself….

The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only about other people but also about situations.

What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation: make it into an enemy.

The implication is always: this should not be happening;

I don’t want to be here; I don’t want to be doing this; I’m being treated unfairly.

And the ego’s greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

Sunday Quote: Where we are

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Our humble way… is to root ourselves –  

beneath the thousand dreams and excuses

that keep us from the ground we walk.

Mark Nepo.

Transitions

Karl Duffy2 Comments

It has been a very slow transition this year….

One of the beautiful transitions in nature is the transition from winter to springtime. An old Zen mystic said, when one flower blooms it is spring everywhere. When the first innocent, infant-like flower appears on the earth, one senses nature stirring beneath the frozen surface. There is a lovely phrase in Gaelic, ‘ag borradh’, meaning that there is a quivering life about to break forth. The wonderful colours and the new life the earth receives makes spring a time of great exuberance and hope. In a certain sense, spring is the youngest season. Winter is the oldest season. Winter was there form the very beginning. It reigned amidst the silence and bleakness of nature for hundreds of millions of years before vegetation. Spring is a youthful season; it comes forth in a rush of life and promise, hope and possibility. At the heart of the spring there is a great inner longing. It is the time when desire and memory stir towards each other. Consequently, springtime in your soul is a wonderful time to undertake some new adventure, some new project, or to make some important changes in your life. If you undertake this, when it is springtime in your soul, then the rhythm, the energy and the hidden light of your own clay works with you. You are in the flow of your own growth and potential. Springtime in the soul can be beautiful, hopeful and strenghtening. You can make difficult transitions very naturally in an unforced and spontaneous way.

John O’Donohue,  Anam Cara

Knowing in a new way

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Wisdom is not the gathering of more facts and information, as if that would eventually coalesce into truth.

Wisdom is precisely a different way of seeing and knowing the “ten thousand things” in a new way.

I suggest that wisdom is precisely the freedom to be truly present to what is right in front of you. Presence is wisdom! People who are fully present know how to see fully, rightly, and truthfully. Presence is the one thing necessary for wisdom, and in many ways, it is the hardest thing of all. Just try to keep 1) your heart space open, 2) your mind without division or resistance, and 3) your body not somewhere else — and all at the same time!

Most religions just decided it was easier to believe doctrines and obey often-arbitrary laws than the truly converting work of being present. Those who can be present will know what they need to know, and in a wisdom way.

Richard Rohr, The Naked Now, Learning to See as the Mystics See

A path

Karl Duffy2 Comments

 

Heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life. Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a child lost before their time. But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.

Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is a deeper introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something or someone who has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the last letting go.

David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.