Tag: growth

Being disturbed

Karl Duffy4 Comments

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May you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire
that disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.

may you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease
to discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.

may the forms of your belonging – in love, creativity, and friendship –
be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.

may the one you long for long for you.
may your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.

may a secret providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.

may your mind inhabit your life with the sureness
with which your body inhabits the world.

may your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.

may you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.

may you know the urgency with which God longs for you.

John O Donohue

Sunday Quote: What autumn teaches

Karl Duffy4 Comments

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Imitate the trees.

Learn to lose in order to recover,

and remember that nothing stays the same for long,

not even pain.

May Sarton

Conscious living

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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The real goal of a therapy is not a “cure”, for the human condition is not a disease. Yes, real, resistant problems of daily life can and must be addressed and the resources of consciousness brought fully to bear on their resolution. But the real gift of a therapy, or of any truly considered life, is that one achieves a deepened conversation around the meaning of one’s journey – a conversation without which one lives a received life, not one’s own, a superficial life, or a life in service to complexes or ideologies.

James Hollis, What Matter most: Living a more considered Life

photo alexei kuprianov

Taking things personally

Karl Duffy1 Comment

lakes

It’s true that different people have different mind stuff to work with, but essentially there comes about a realization that the core of the feeling of suffering comes from something we all do: we take things personally. And you can’t stop doing this simply as an idea. The practice involves cessation – letting go of “self” through directly knowing “self”. This must occur by feeling out and examining some pretty well-known positions ….”I cant do it” is one of them, and the list goes on through every kind of self-view about “I’m not worthy/good enough”, “It’s not good enough for me” ” I have a lot of karma to work out”…In the course of practice, all of these self-views come and go continually until gradually the realization of their impermanence begins to sink in.

Ajahn Sucitto, The Dawn of the Dhamma

Remaining astonished by life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

tearmann

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension,

which we feel as paralysis because

we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.

Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet

photo of the coffee shop in Kilcullen, called An Tearmann,  which is Irish for “Refuge” or “Sanctuary”

Withdrawing permission

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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In standing still and receiving life with all its adversity and sorrow, you have withdrawn your permission for suffering to define your life. You have also withdrawn your consent to living in fear. Something profound happens in your heart when you turn with kindness toward all the circumstances of pain which you have previously repressed, dismissed or fled from. There is a softening, an opening, a deepening capacity and willingness to understand sorrow and its cause.

Christine Feldman, Compassion

photo shaun ferguson