Tag: growth

Clouds and rain

Karl Duffy2 Comments

clouds sun jura

You must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Sometimes we do not know

Karl Duffy5 Comments

File:Dark Days Are Coming.jpg

Frequently we don’t know the answers to some of the questions that life throws at us.  We come to see that there is always a balance between knowing and not knowing. We prefer knowing, certainty, clear ideas. But maybe wisdom comes from being able to allow what we don’t know, and from learning to trust.

This is how we become wise:

When the formed

is taught by the unformed.

Chuang Tzu

photo taro taylor

Learning

Karl Duffy5 Comments

File:Leri embankment, Borth - geograph.org.uk - 15104.jpg

Suffering is our best teacher because it hangs onto us and keeps us in its grip until we have learned that particular lesson. Only then does suffering let go. If we haven’t learned our lesson, we can be quite sure that the same lesson is going to come again, because life is nothing but an adult education class. If we don’t pass in any of the subjects, we just have to sit the examination again. Whatever lesson we have missed, we will get it again. That is why we find ourselves reacting to similar situations in similar ways many times.

Ayya Khema, Being Nothing,  Going Nowhere

photo nigel callaghan

Through the mist

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Forest valley in mist - geograph.org.uk - 346599.jpg

It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances just as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living. What is real can never be fully taken away; its essence always remains. It might set us a little freer to believe that there is no path in life – in the low valley… or abroad in the mountain night –  that does not lead to some form of heartbreak when the outer narrative disappears and then reappears in a different form. If we are sincere, every … relationship will break our hearts in order to enlarge our understanding of our self and that strange other with whom we have promised ourselves to the future.  We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming; as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.

David Whyte, The Poetic Narrative Of Our Times

photo lis burke

Life as it is

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Bolton 44

It would be great if life proceeded from one moment of perfect happiness to the next, but for most of us, this is not the case. So, just as Dante did, we must proceed by another path, the path through our personal hell, where we encounter moments of pain and feelings of loss and confusion. Given that this is so, you can either live in denial of the truth of your experience or obsess on your pains and disappointments. Or you can consciously accept, even embrace life not working out and trust that in doing so you will discover meaning in your life.

If you choose to consciously embrace pain and loss as your teachers, life itself is not disappointing; it is a series of moments to practice being with life as it is.

Philipp Moffitt, Living with Disappointment

Where to hold on

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Climbing, Owl Rock (6550009887).jpg

It seems to me that one of the key features of mindfulness is that it’s about bearing something in mind. You don’t exactly do letting go: What occurs – through carefully holding and moderating attention around a specific theme – is that the stuff that the mind projects is deprived of a foothold. So it lets go of its pre-occupations. To me, appropriate meditation practice is about aligning one’s attention to a specific object (breathing, body, mental image) and out of the store of moods, phobias and desires that the mind holds in its archives.

Ajahn Sucitto, The Low Point

Photo Arches National Park