heart – Page 198 – Mindfulbalance

Give yourself a break this weekend

January 21, 2012January 20, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

It’s important to acknowledge mistakes, feel appropriate remorse, and learn from them so they don’t happen again. But most people keep beating themselves up way past the point of usefulness: they’re unfairly self-critical. Inside the mind are many sub-personalities. For example, one part of me might set the alarm clock for 6 am to get up and exercise . . . and then when it goes off, another part of me could grumble: “Who set the darn clock?” More broadly, there is a kind of inner critic and inner protector inside each of us. For most people, that inner critic is continually yammering away, looking for something, anything, to find fault with. It magnifies small failings into big ones, punishes you over and over for things long past, ignores the larger context, and doesn’t credit you for your efforts to make amends.

Therefore, you really need your inner protector to stick up for you: to put your weaknesses and misdeeds in perspective, to highlight your many good qualities surrounding your lapses, to encourage you to keep getting back on the high road even if you’ve gone down the low one, and – frankly – to tell that inner critic to Shut Up.

Rick Hanson, The Art of Self-forgiveness

Tuning in to ourselves

January 20, 2012January 19, 2012 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

Staying open on this day

January 20, 2012January 20, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Often the busyness of our lives can lead us to forget the inner vision or the real reason why we set out on our journey in the first place. We can lose our sense of creativity and joy as we constantly react to the shape which our days impose upon us. Staying open to this space – to our vision for our lives, to a deeper place of meaning, to nourishing the inner places of joy – is a challenge as we face deadlines and the demands for success. How do we keep in touch with our true inheritance today?

In that first hardly noticed
moment to which you wake,
coming back to this life
from the other more secret,
moveable and frighteningly
honest world where everything began,
there is a small opening
into the new day
which closes the moment
you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light of the morning
window toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you to your
one love? What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow and spread
its branches against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open and lovely
white page on the waiting desk?

David Whyte, What to remember when Waking

Working with all parts of our life

January 19, 2012January 18, 2012 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

This moment!

January 19, 2012January 18, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Most of life only lasts a moment. Then our life becomes a memory, a dream. We are only alive a millisecond at a time. This moment! Or as one teacher puts it, holding his thumb and forefinger about a quarter-inch apart “All of life is only just this much – about a moment at a time”. When we open to the very instant in which awareness produces consciousness, we are fully alive. Completely present. Big-minded. To the degree that we are present for “just this much”, this living moment, we are alive. Otherwise we numb to the vibrancy, and beg upon our deathbed for just one more chance.

Stephen and Ondrea Levine, Embracing the Beloved.

Where we grow

January 18, 2012January 17, 2012 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We never grow by dreaming about a future wonderful state or by remembering past feats. We grow by being where we are and experiencing what our life is right now. We must experience our anger, our sorrow, our failure, our apprehension; they can all be our teachers., when we do not separate ourselves from them. When we escape from what is given, we cannot learn, we cannot grow. That’s not hard to understand, just hard to do. Those who persist, however, will be those who grow in compassion and understanding. How long is such practice required? Forever.