Tag: heart

Visualizing our day

Karl Duffy1 Comment

What do you visualize before you start work? Do you imagine yourself managing the day successfully and calmly? Or do you anticipate all the stressful things that might come up an d how overwhelmed you’ll feel? Many of us tend to ruminate or catastrophize about the negative events we expect to happen at work. Maybe you worry about dealing with irate customers, dread making a phone call, or cringe at the prospect of hurting your back again. Regardless of whether or not these scenarios may happen or not, we often don’t imagine ourselves handling them very well. When we worry, we are prone to focus on how bad something will be, without doing any concrete problem solving or realizing that life will continue, even if this anticipated disaster occurs. Before work, rather than worry about the coming day…visualize in a positive way what will happen today. Imagine yourself having a nice day. If you’re likely to encounter obstacles or setbacks, visualize managing them well. Research shows that this kind of mental rehearsal improves later performance.

Jonathan S. Kaplan, Urban Mindfulness

Where we focus the mind

Karl Duffy1 Comment


Sometimes a lot of our thoughts and feelings can be connected with what we do not have, or by what has been done to us. The mind seems to have a great desire to hold on to things or events,  and this is the same no matter if the experience is positive or negative. We can see this when we find ourselves remembering negative words spoken years ago, or encounter people holding decades-old grudges. If we focus on what we do not have, we frequently  compare our condition to other more “desirable” conditions.  And when we look at our life in terms of what did not work out for us, we can feel a deep sense of lack and go on to cultivate a profound sense of dissatisfaction. However, if we are spending ongoing time noticing what we have lost or do not have, rather than what we actually have, it is clear that, paradoxically, it is not truly lost, but is still present and recurring in a transformed form, to remind us or even haunt us with its presence. Meditation is essentially a practice of de-grasping- of working with a mind that likes to push away or hold onto reality – by patiently sitting with conditions as they actually are. 

Losing too is still ours;
and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.

When something’s let go of, it circles;
and though we are rarely the center of the circle,
it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.

Rilke, For Hans Carossa

Finding our confidence within

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When we are well with ourselves, then whatever happens, it really doesn’t matter, because we have equilibrium and stability. We don’t feel any lack of confidence.

If not, we’re always on edge, waiting to see how someone reacts to us, what people say to us or think about us. Our confidence hangs on what people tell us about how we are, how we look, how we behave.

When we are really in touch with ourselves, we know ourselves beyond what others may tell us. So these three qualities – a good heart, stability, and spaciousness – these are really what you could call basic human virtues.

Sogyal Rinpoche

Doing the 24 hours well

Karl Duffy2 Comments

All of us are appointed to the same teacher that religious institutions originally worked with: reality. Reality insight says: “Master the 24 hours, do it well, without self-pity”.  It is as hard to get the children herded into the car and down the road to the bus as it is to chant sutras in the hall on a cold morning. One move is not better than the other; each can be quite boring, and they both have the virtuous quality of repetition. Repetition and ritual and their good results come in many forms: changing the oil filters, wiping noses, going to meetings, picking up around the house, washing clothes, checking the dipstick. Don’t let yourself think that these are distracting you from more serious pursuits. Such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape from so that we may do our practice, which will put us on the path. It is our path.

Gary Snyder, poet, quoted in Gil Fronsdal, Evaluate your Meditation

Seeing how the mind adds on..

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Someone calls you an idiot….Then you start thinking “How can they call me an idiot? They’ve got no right to call me an idiot! How rude to call me an idiot!  I’ll get them back for calling me an idiot”  And you suddenly realise that you have let them call you an idiot another four  times. Every time you remember what they said, you allow them to call you an idiot once again. Therein lies the problem.

If someone calls you an idiot,  and you immediately let go, therein lies the solution.

Why allow other people control your inner happiness?

Ajahn Brahm, Who Ordered this Truckload of Dung?

A basic sense of groundlessness

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Some reflections on the basic human condition – similar to the idea of groundlessness in Pema Chodron this morning –  this time in a commentary on a phrase from Karl Rahner, one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the last century. Learning to sit with this is the basic work of meditation. Running away from it, or taking it to mean that something is wrong with us is at the root of most of our problems.

In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable,we eventually learn that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.  Karl Rahner

What does it mean to be tormented by “insufficiency of everything attainable?” How are we tortured by what we cannot have? We all experience this daily. In fact, for all but a few privileged, peaceful times, this torment is like an undertow to everything we experience; beauty makes us restless when it should bring us peace, the love we experience with our spouse does not fulfill our longings, the relationships we have within our families seem too petty and too domestic to be fulfilling, our job is hopelessly inadequate to the dreams we have for ourselves, the place we live in seems boring and lifeless in comparison to other places, and we are too restless to sit peacefully at our own tables, sleep peacefully in our own beds, and be at ease within our own skins. We are tormented by the insufficiency of everything attainable when our lives are too small for us and we live in them in such a way that we are always waiting, waiting for something or somebody to come along and change things so that our lives , as we imagine them, might begin. ….. To be tormented with restlessness is to be human.

Ron Rolheiser