Tag: growth

Tuning in to ourselves

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Perhaps the most common and pernicious form of non-listening is our non-listening to ourselves. So much of what we actually feel and think is unacceptable to us. We have been actually conditioned over a lifetime to simply not hear all our own self-pity, anger, desire, jealousy, wonder. Most of what we take to be our adult response is no more than our unconscious decision not to listen to what goes on inside us. And as with any human relationship, not listening to ourselves damages our self-respect. To allow ourselves to feel what we actually do feel – not to be afraid or dismayed but to open up a space inside our hearts large enough to safely contain what we feel, with the faith that whatever comes up is workable and even necessary – this is what any healthy, mature human being needs to do and what we so often fail to do.

Norman Fischer, Taking Our Places

Working with all parts of our life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

If God is right there in the midst of our struggle, then our aim is to stay there.  We are to remain in the cell, to stay on the road, not to forego the journey or forget the darkness. It is all too easy for us to overlook the importance of struggle, preferring instead to secure peace and rest, or presuming to reach the stage of love prematurely. It is always easier to let things pass by, to go on without examination or effort. Yet, struggling means living. It is a way of fully living life and not merely observing it. It takes much time and a great  effort to unite the disparate, disjointed and divided parts of the self into an integrated whole. 

John Chryssavgis, In the Heart of the Desert

Letting go in Winter

Karl Duffy1 Comment

As the embrace of the earth welcomes all we call death,

Taking deep into itself  the right solitude of a seed,

Allowing it time to shed the grip of former form

And give way to a deeper generosity that will one day send it forth,

A tree into springtime,

May all that holds you fall from its hungry ledge Into the fecund surge of your heart.

John O’Donohue

The hidden work that is essential for growth

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The ladder whose ascent implies spiritual progress has a long pedigree.  Hebrews, Greeks and Christians all gave special value to the heights, and Western morality tends to put all better things up high and worse things down low. By the last century growth became inexorably caught in this ascensionist fantasy. Darwin’s thesis The Descent of Man became, in our minds, the ascent of man. Each immigrant moved upward in social class as buildings moved upwards with their elevators to more expensive levels. By now the upward idea of growth has become a biographical cliché. To be an adult is to be a grown-up. Yet this is merely one way of speaking of maturity, and an heroic one at that. For even tomato plants and the  tallest trees send down roots as they rise toward the light. Yet the metaphors for our lives see mainly the upward part of the organic motion.

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code

All seasons are needed for growth

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Our inner life is complex and multifaceted, like a vast and varied landscape requiring diverse experiences to cultivate it. At times we are challenged to walk and run, at other times to stay and sit. Disappointment is as crucial to our inner life as reliability, the same way that cold is as necessary to the life of a lilac bush as is the sun….Beings like us could never stay in bloom in a tropical world of uninterrupted satisfactions. We need all seasons for a fully realized human experience. Only in a world with shadows can our inner life flourish. The challenge is a ruthless fealty to the seasons of life and change. This includes losses, abandonments and endings chosen or imposed…Disappointment may also be a grace, “the fastest chariot to enlightenment” as the Tibetan saying goes.

David Richo, How to be an Adult in Relationships.

Staying where we are

Karl Duffy1 Comment

As I said in an earlier post this week, there are a number of themes that recur in all cultures around this time,  as the Winter Solstice approaches. One of them is patience –  waiting in hope for the dark days to pass and for the signs of new life and growth to reappear. So here, as on previous Sundays,  is a reflection on the rich meaning of the word patience, both as a practice of staying with what is happening in each moment, as well as a way of working with difficult times in our lives.

A waiting person is a patient person. The word “patience” means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there. Waiting, then, is not passive. It involves nurturing the moment, as a mother nurtures the child that is growing in her womb.

Henri Nouwen, Eternal Seasons: A Spiritual Journey through the Church’s Year