Tag: growth

The Shore

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Sea01

Beyond this shore and the farther shore,
Beyond the beyond,
Where there is no beginning, No end.
Without fear, go.

The Buddha

We live with many options. If we get bored with looking at a painting, we read something; when that becomes boring, we go for a walk, perhaps visit a friend and go out for dinner together, then watch a movie. The pattern is that each new arising, or “birth” if you like, is experienced as unfulfilling. In this process of ongoing need, we keep moving from this to that without ever getting to the root of the process. Another aspect of this need is the need to fix things, or to fix ourselves — to make conflict or pain go away. By this I mean an instinctive response rather than a measured approach of understanding what is possible to fix and what dukkha (suffering)  has to be accommodated right now.

Then there’s the need to know, to have it all figured out. That gets us moving too. This continued movement is an unenlightened being’s response to dukkha. That movement is what is meant by … “the wandering on” – within this life, we can see all these “births,” — the same habit taking different forms. And each new birth is unsatisfactory too, because sooner or later we meet with another obstacle, another disappointment, another option in the ongoing merry-go-round. High-option cultures just give you a few more spins on the wheel.

Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

Stuck

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File:Stuck in the Mud - geograph.org.uk - 162160.jpg

In the face of the new and uncertain, we often return to the old place, which is why we so often stop growing. This is an example of what Jung called “the regressive restoration of the persona,” namely, the re-identification with a former position, role, ideology because it offers a predictable content, security, and script. (It has become clear to me, for example, that aging in itself does not bring wisdom. It often brings regression to childishness, dependency, and bitterness over lost opportunities).  Regression, which we all suffer from time to time, is an abrogation of our summons to live more fully into the world, to risk being who we are, and to accept the gift that our differences bring to the collective.

James Hollis, What Matters Most

photo chris upson

 

Letting go of our entanglements

Karl Duffy10 Comments

I came across a baby Jackdaw last evening in the grounds of the monastery at Moone. It was still somewhat unsteady in flight and was taking a rest on the ground, seeming a little bit intimidated by the next step it has to take in life, having to let go and learn to fly.

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing-
each stone, blossom, child –
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things teach us: to fall,
patiently trusting our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Dont know Mind I

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

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To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.

To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.

Pema Chodron

photo mike baird

Getting real

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Dark Lane path - geograph.org.uk - 275666.jpg

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work

and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

Wendell Berry

photo steve f

A part of life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Fading Flower (3293338820).jpg

Movement and change are interesting aspects of life to work with. On one level change is obvious – such as the rain last night in Ireland after a few days of lovely sun – and we frequently resist this, acting as if we expect things to always remain the same. On another level, we have an inner restlessness which is constantly moving us to want change, that things be different, “better”, a constant inner “becoming” that does not make contentment in the present moment easy. This quote deals with impermanence, but both aspects – impermanence and becoming – have to be worked with, if we are to become fully human.

Change of one sort or another is the essence of life, so there will always be the loneliness and insecurity that come with change. When we refuse to accept that loneliness and insecurity are part of life, when we refuse to accept that they are the price of change, we close the door on many possibilities for ourselves; our lives become lessened, we are less than fully human.

If we try to prevent, or ignore, the movement of life, we run the risk of falling into the inevitable depression that must accompany an impossible goal. Life evolves; change is constant. When we try to prevent the forward movement of life, we may succeed for a while but, inevitably there is an explosion; the groundswell of life’s constant movement, constant change, is too great to resist.

Jean Vanier, Becoming Human

photo xlibber