Tag: heart

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

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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

Getting to know our fears well

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Finding the courage to go to the places that scare us cannot happen without compassionate inquiry into the workings of ego…… Flexibility and openness bring strength ……. running from groundlessness weakens us and brings pain. But do we understand that becoming familiar with the running away is the key? Openness doesn’t come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well.

Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times,

Letting the day pass through the mind

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We can …. look upon life as something that flows through the mind. Rather than thinking of oneself as a person who is going places, consider these as images going through the mind. Right now we have the image of the meditation hall; this is what we can perceive. The sound of this voice; the feeling of sitting on a cushion; the sense of sight; see that all these things flow through the mind like a current. When Ajahn Sumedho went traveling recently he said he made the determination before he left that he wasn’t going to go around the world, he was just going to let the world go through his mind. Afterwards he said the result was very peaceful: he went everywhere, saw everyone, did everything, but the sense of movement, of a person heading towards somewhere, was absent; there was stillness in its place.

Ajahn Amaro