Tag: growth

The seeds within

Karl Duffy4 Comments

File:Pinus cembra shoot.jpg

Mindfulness involves paying attention to and nurturing what is helpful, as well as evaluating,  and not allowing a footing to, those seeds which will cause confusion and distress:

If we take good care of everything in us, without discrimination, we prevent our negative energies from dominating. We reduce the strength of our negative seeds so that they won’t overwhelm us. Mindfulness means to be present, to be aware of what is going on. This energy is very crucial for the practice. The energy of mindfulness is like a big brother or big sister, holding a young one in her arms, taking good care of the suffering child, which is our anger, despair, or jealousy. So mindfulness recognizes, embraces, and revives. Mindfulness helps us look deeply in order to gain insight. Insight is the liberating factor. It is what frees us and allows transformation to happen. 

Thich Nhat Hahn, Taming the Tiger Within

photo Ude

Blocked and moving forward

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Fallen tree over the Beaulieu River, New Forest - geograph.org.uk - 179496.jpg

The river flows rapidly down the mountain, and then all of a sudden it gets blocked with big boulders and a lot of trees. The water can’t go any farther, even though it has tremendous force and forward energy. It just gets blocked there. That’s what happens with us, too; we get blocked like that. Letting go at the end of the out-breath, letting the thoughts go, is like moving one of those boulders away so that the water can keep flowing, so that our energy and our life force can keep evolving and going forward. We don’t, out of fear of the unknown, have to put up these blocks, these dams, that basically say no to life and to feeling life.

Pema Chodron

photo jim champion

Becoming the ground

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

boltonSummer was like your house: you know where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart  as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind  sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.  It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Trees at Bolton Abbey, Moone. Co Kildare

Looking forward, moving on

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

dawn 2013 solstice

The days have been especially short this week in Ireland, with dark mornings and darkness closing in early in the afternoon, and the wind and the rain making things seem even gloomier. However, this morning, after a very stormy start, the dawn shone bright and clear. For the ancients, this midwinter solstice sun gave some relief and hope, as it marked the rebirth of light after the shortest days of the year. It marked a turning point, a reversal of the lengthening of night and shortening of days. For us too, these weeks allow a period of reflection and can be a time of turning, as we reflect on what is stagnant in out lives and let go of those things. We all take wrong turnings from time to time, or need a period to start afresh. We move on, and look to the future, even in f we do not know what shape it will take

No seed ever sees the flower

Zen Saying

Larger questions

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Wide (4364589798).jpg

The older we get the more we realize there are no final answers, although there may be personal discoveries which make sense to us, and that our life is more a journey toward larger and larger questions.  Lived thusly, we are living a developmental, enlarging life and not one in which we have died before we died.   Any certainties we do acquire are for now only, and may be replaced by ever more challenging experiences.

James Hollis

photo christopher

Unreal Expectations

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Renunciation is not the same as giving up pleasure or denying ourselves happiness. It means giving up our unreal expectations about ordinary pleasures. These expectations themselves are what turn pleasure into pain… Simply stated, renunciation is the feeling of being so completely fed up with our recurring problems that we are finally ready to turn away from our attachments to this and that and begin searching for another way to make our life meaningful… To develop renunciation means to realize how our ordinary reliance on pleasure is preventing us from tasting a higher, more complete happiness

Lama Yeshe