Tag: heart

The key to contentment

Karl DuffyLeave a comment
A man is satisfied not by the quantity of food, but by the absence of greed.  Gurdjieff

We suffer, often unknowingly, from wanting to be in two places at once, from wanting to experience more than one person can. Feeling like we are missing something or that we’re being left out, we want it all. But being human we can’t have it all. The tension of all this can lead to an insatiable search, where our passion for life is stirred, but never satisfied. When caught in this mindset, no amount of travel is enough, no amount of love is enough, no amount of success is enough.

I am not saying that we shouldn’t explore our curiosity and venture into the unknown. What I’m referring to here is that seed of lack that makes us feel insufficient, and then somehow, to compensate, we start to race through life with one eye on what we have and one eye on what we don’t….When we believe we are behind or less than, we somehow start to want more than we need, as if what we don’t have will fill in our pain and make us feel whole, as if the thing we have not tasted will be the thing to bring us alive. The truth is that one experience taken to heart will satisfy our hunger to be loved by everyone.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

To thine own self be true

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

To be yourself 

in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else

is the greatest accomplishment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Letting go of old patterns

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns. Now you realise how precious your time here is. You are no longer willing to squander your essence on undertakings that do not nourish your true self; your patience grows thin with tired talk and dead language. You see through the rosters of expectation which promise you safety and the confirmation of your outer identity. Now you are impatient for growth, willing to put yourself in the way of change. You want your work to become an expression of your gift. You want your relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells. You want your God to be wild and to call you to where your destiny awaits.

John O’Donohue

Never having really lived

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered: 

“Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

A love that does not have conditions

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We can develop a love that is steadfast and universal. We develop it not because we force ourselves to love so fully. Rather, we discover that loving unconditionally is the greatest source of joy, and that we are the loser for any hesitation or interruption in that love, such as “I would really love you if you would just do your share of the cooking, if you would just do this, if you would be like that.”

Whenever we hesitate like that, we lose. This helps me remember not to mortgage away any of my days by having a grudge or a grievance or making myself distant. That would simply cause a rupture in that steadfast, universal love that is so joyful.

Sylvia Boorstein

Making space for new words

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past Into indifferent lives, or into any future; You are not the same people who left that station Or who will arrive at any terminus.  T.S. Eliot, The Dry Savages

The Latin word “limen” means “threshold” . Liminality is an inner state ands sometimes an outer situation where people can begin to think and act in genuinely new ways. It is when we are betwixt and between, have left one room but not yet entered the next room, any hiatus between stages of life, stages of faith, jobs, loves or relationships. It is that graced time when we are not certain or in control, when something genuinely new can happen. We are empty, receptive, an erased tablet waiting for new words. Nothing fresh or creative will normally happen when we are inside our  self-constructed comfort zones,  only more of the same. Nothing original emerges from business as usual. It seems we need some anti-structure to give direction, depth and purpose to our regular structure. Otherwise, structure, which is needed in the first half of life, tends to become a prison as we grow older. Much of the work of …human destiny itself is to get people into liminal space and to keep them there long enough to learn something essential and genuinely new. It is the ultimate teaching space. In some sense it is the only teaching space.

Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return