Tag: heart

Ever-widening circles of trust.

Karl Duffy1 Comment

holding hands

Many of us have been convinced – by our society, by our own experiences in life, and by our own logic, that we cannot trust our own natural state of being. We turn away from ourselves and our experiences. In mindfulness practice we are learning not to destroy or control our feelings, but to discover them and be present with them. We begin to see how they work when we enter fully into them and give them room. We begin to see how we create our emotional lives and reactions. In this process, we learn to trust awareness and direct presence more and more deeply. As we explore the layers of our fear, our trust expands into wider and wider circles of who we are. The process of awakening can be understood as ever-widening circles of trust. …… Fearlessness is not necessarily the absence of fear. It is a positive quality that can exist side by side with fear, overcoming the limitations arising out of fear.

Gil Fronsdal, The Issue at hand

The space in between

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File:Glendalough, Ireland.jpg

I spent yesterday morning in the lovely retreat house at the Tearmann Spirituality Center  in Glendalough,  Co. Wicklow,  with the MBSR group I am currently working with. A quiet morning of sitting meditation and walking, and space in the wide expanses of the mountains and the forest. We tend to get consumed by the activities we do,  the words we say, the thoughts we think,  and the things we have. Our minds get drawn there, and not to the spaces before and after that hold them. What if the gaps were more important? What if we practiced  focusing more on the spaces around moments, nurturing them and making wider the gaps within and without? These are the home of the spirit. They nourish us, widening the heart and giving life.

Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock — more than a maple — universe.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

photo,  Glendalough,  pixie from he

Depth and richness

Karl Duffy3 Comments

sitting2

Settle down in your room at a moment when you have nothing else to do. Say “I am now with myself,” and just sit with yourself. After an amazingly short time you will most likely feel bored. This teaches us one very useful thing. It gives us insight into the fact that if after ten minutes of being alone with ourselves we feel like that, it is no wonder that others should feel equally bored! Why is this so? It is so because we have so little to offer to our own selves as food for thought, for emotion and for life. If you watch your life carefully you will discover quite soon that we hardly ever live from within outwards; instead we respond to incitement, to excitement. In other words, we live by reaction… We are completely empty, we do not act from within ourselves but accept as our life a life which is actually fed in from the outside; we are used to things happening which compel us to do other things. How seldom can we live simply by means of the depth and the richness we assume that there is within ourselves.

Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Learning to Pray

Complete

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No creature ever falls short of its own completion.

Wherever it stands it does not fail to cover the ground

Dogen

Being present

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File:Ecola State Park Haystack Rock.JPG

To listen is to lean in softly
With a willingness to be changed
By what we hear


Mark Nepo

photo brmuchin at en.wikipedia

Touch

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Being aware of subtle emotional qualities you may be embodying at various times of the day. Pay particular attention to your hands.  See if you don’t become more mindful by becoming more “bodyful.” Everything from opening a door to making love involves touch. It is possible to open a door so mindlessly that your hand doesn’t know what your body is doing and you hit yourself in the head with it. Imagine the challenge of touching another person without automaticity, with no gaining idea, just presence and caring.

Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, There you are

photo agustin ruiz