Tag: heart

Standing still and withdrawing your consent to fear

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

In our practice we cultivate awareness –  the capacity to hold even the events and thoughts and fears that bother us with kindness and non-judgment.  This means, as Christine Feldman tells us here, that we create enough of a gap between us and our fears that we no longer allow them to define our sense of self, or let them mean that we are doing something wrong:

It is a great relief to stop running from pain. In standing still and receiving life with all its adversity and sorrow, you have withdrawn your permission for suffering to define your life. You have also withdrawn your consent to living in fear. Something profound happens in your heart when you turn with kindness toward all the circumstances of pain which you have previously repressed, dismissed or fled from. There is a softening, an opening, a deepening capacity and willingness to understand sorrow and its cause. You come to understand that your willingness to be present with difficulties is the midwife to compassion.

Christine Feldman, Compassion

Working with difficulties – not looking for resolution

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Patience is a way to de-escalate aggression and its accompanying pain. This is to say that when we’re feeling aggressive — and I think this would go for any strong emotion — there’s a seductive quality that pulls us in the direction of wanting to get some resolution. We feel restless, agitated, ill at ease. It hurts so much to feel the aggression that we want it to be resolved. Right then we could change the way we look at this discomfort and practice patience.

Pema Chodron

Holding the parts of our life together

Karl Duffy2 Comments

The current understanding of work-life balance is too simplistic. People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. Some other dynamic is at play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and often set them against one another. We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way. These hidden human dynamics of integration are more of a conversation, more of a synthesis and more of an almost religious and sometimes delirious quest for meaning than a simple attempt at daily ease and contentment.

David Whyte, The Three Marriages: Reimagining work, self and Relationship

We like to find someone, something to blame

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look into the reasons it is not doing well.  It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or our family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like lettuce.

Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and arguments. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.

Thich Nhat Hahn

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