Tag: heart

Today, Notice what goes right

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Each of us is like a mosaic, with lots of lovely tiles, some that are basically neutral, and a few that could use a little – ah – work. It’s important to see the whole mosaic. But because of the brains negativity bias, we tend to fixate on what’s wrong with ourselves instead of what’s right. If you do twenty things in a day and nineteen go fine, what’s the one you think about? Probably the one that didn’t go so well.

Your brain builds new structures based on what you pay attention to. Focusing on the “bad” tiles in the mosaic that is you keeps feeding an underlying sense of being mediocre, flawed or less than others. And it blocks the development of the confidence and self-worth that comes from recognizing the good tiles. These results of the negativity bias are not fair. But they’re a big reason why most of us have feelings of inadequacy or self-doubt.

Rick Hanson, Just One Thing

Staying open in our work

Karl Duffy2 Comments

You must remain open to the possibilities and resist the temptation to make a closure before your life has run out. This means always keeping your very identity open-ended, because a life work defines you. Spiritual writers sometimes say that all finite loves point to an infinite love, and so there is always a yearning for more. The same could be true of a life work. Any finite task or career points to another beyond it. Your sense of what you are meant to do with your life has to remain open-ended, no matter how much or how little you feel you have accomplished. You never know fully what you are called to do.

Thomas Moore, A Life at Work

In our world, as it is

Karl Duffy1 Comment

To practice we must start exactly where we are. Of course, we can imagine perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everybody else should behave. But it’s not our task to create an ideal. It is our task to see how it is and to learn from the world how it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.

Ajahn Sumedho, The way it is

Seeing things from a different perspective today

Karl Duffy3 Comments

My favorite picture is earthrise as seen from the moon. It’s perfect. A great blue and green ball floating in vast black space, hanging right there in its orbit. From that vantage point,  the scene on earth is awesome. creatures being born, other ones dying; plants blooming on one side, plants withering on the other; snow snowing, winds blowing, volcanoes erupting, earthquakes shivering, people talking, music playing. From the moonview, its incredible cosmic drama. From our usual view, inside the drama, looking up at the moon, it’s a different story. It changes from the drama to my drama and gets to be a problem. If you’re far enough away, it’s not your story – its one of the six and a half billion stories.

Sylvia Boorstein: It’s Easier than you Think

Combining effort and allowing

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The combination of stillness and movement is a spiritually effective style for how we live our lives. We refuse to be caught up in activity but are committed to frequent pausing, taking time to let things unfold. [This] combination of opposites characterizes us when we find psychological health and enter the spiritual realm, the twin goals of our evolution towards wholeness. We combine our psychological work, which takes effort, with our spiritual work, which takes allowing. The ego-Higher Self axis that happens in such individuation is visible in the combination of action and acceptance. A statue is motionless, but movement bursts forth, not only in the how the sculptor’s imagination brings it to life, but in the mysterious sense of motion he has achieved. This may be what he poet Rilke meant by “outer standstill and inner movement”

David Richo, Being True to Life

Where is the point of life to be found?

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We could say that meditation doesn’t have a reason or doesn’t have a purpose. In this respect it’s unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

Alan Watts