Tag: growth

On not waiting too long…….to live your life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The great Indian poet Kabir reminding us that at every moment in our life we are challenged to live fully.  We need not wait for some time in the future to find the “right conditions” for happiness. There is no such thing as a perfect time. Now is the only time we have –  to face into our fears, to shake off what we know is holding us back, to let go of whatever we are carrying that  no longer gives us life, to cross the river ahead of us.

Wherever you are is the entry point

I said to the wanting-creature inside me:
What is this river you want to cross?
There are no travelers on the river-road,
and no road.

Be strong then, and
enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place
for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don’t go off somewhere else

If you don’t break your ropes
while you’re alive,
do you think ghosts will do it after?

A work in progress

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Self-actualization is not a sudden happening or even the permanent result of long effort. The eleventh-century Tibetan Buddhist poet-saint Milarupa suggested: “Do not expect full realization; simply practice every day of your life.” A healthy person is not perfect but perfectible, not a done deal but a work in progress. Staying healthy takes discipline, work, and patience, which is why our life is a journey and perforce a heroic one.

David Richo, How to be an Adult in Relationships

Claim your own happiness

Karl Duffy1 Comment

One of the greatest disciplines of existence, especially as we grow older, is the discipline of innocence and of keeping the sense of wonder and enlargement and surprise alive in your own heart. And the moment that you stop, in a sense, living from your innocence is the moment where you start to feel besieged by existence and the moment you need defences and walls. And no matter how high you build these walls, the encroaching sea of existence will actually scour them away. And you will somehow be revealed. But because you lived in exile from what is innocent and real about yourself, what frightens you most in life is your own happiness. I think one of the most difficult things in life is claiming your own happiness.

David Whyte, The Creative Imperative

Becoming the person you have always been

Karl Duffy2 Comments

With twenty-one words, carefully chosen and artfully woven,  May Sarton evokes the quest for vocation – at least, my quest for vocation – with candor and precision:

Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people’s faces.

What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity – the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.It is a strange gift, this birthright gift of self. Accepting it turns out to be even more demanding than attempting to become someone else!

Parker Palmer, Let your Life Speak

Following our heart or security

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A multitude of forces in this world certainly conspires to divide us against ourselves, our power and authenticity, our voices, even our ability to simply listen to ourselves and believe what we hear…”Nature places a simple constraint on those who leave the flock and go their own way” say David Bayles and Ted Orland in Art and Fear. “They get eaten! In society it is a bit more complicated, but the admonition stands: Avoiding the unknown has considerable survival value. Society and nature…tend to produce guarded creatures” The upshot is that we often end up trading our authenticity for what we perceive as survival, terrified to swap security for our heart’s deep desires, which is the imperative of all callings and one of the dominant fears in responding to them. Saying yes to the calls tends to place you on a path that half of yourself thinks does not make a bit of sense, but the other half knows your life won’t make sense without.

George Michael Leroy, Calling: Finding and Following an Authentic Life

Spring: The Narrative reappears

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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 good marriage or 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. Being a good parent will necessarily break our hearts as we watch a child grow and eventually choose their own way, even through many of the same heartbreaks we have traversed. Following a vocation or an art form through decades of practice and understanding will break the idealistic heart that began the journey and replace it, if we sidestep the temptations of bitterness and self-pity, with something more malleable, compassionate and generous than the metaphysical organ with which we began the journey. 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