Tag: heart

Then – stopping the stories comparisons provoke

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Do you notice a tendency to measure or compare yourself with others or with the easy happiness which is portrayed in the media?

We hear, imagine and watch so many stories! Our life is becoming more and more inundated with TV shows, movies, magazines, and newspaper articles that seem to show us what life is like. And then the inevitable comparisons arise: “My life isn?t like that” or “I wish it were” or “It is exactly like that”. The moment we notice painful or sad feelings arising from thoughts like “I’m unloved. I feel separate and isolated” can we immediately stop, look and listen,  instead of going on weaving fancy narratives about ourselves? Can we stop and ask “Where is this feeling coming from?” Right now. Asking right this moment. Becoming more transparent to thoughts and images that evoke these feelings and then deepen,  embellish, and propagate them.

Toni Parker, The Silent Question

The search within us

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There are different ways in which writers describe the inherent restlessness deep within us, with which we are often uneasy and consequently work to cover over by activity or the things we do to seek recognition and success. As I have written before, mindfulness practice encourages us to come to a working understanding that there will always be a deep restlessness at the heart of life, and that is just the way things are. It does not mean there is anything wrong with our life, or with us, despite what we may feel from time to time. Another way of looking at this restlessness is seen in this quotation from the influential Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan. He sees it as a positive drive to know, an impulse to keep going beyond immediate experience, the root of all searching, which may never be completely satisfied:

Deep within us all, emergent when the noise of other appetites is stilled, there is a drive to know, to understand, to see why, to discover the reason, to find the cause, to explain. Just what is wanted has many names. In what precisely it consists is a matter of dispute. But the fact of inquiry is beyond all doubt. It can absorb a man. It can keep him for hours, day after day, year after year, in the narrow prison of his study or his laboratory. It can send him on dangerous voyages of exploration. It can withdraw him from other interests, other pursuits, other pleasures, other achievements. It can fill his waking thoughts, hide from him the world of ordinary affairs, invade the very fabric of his dreams. It can demand endless sacrifices that are made without regret though there is only the hope, never a certain promise, of success.

Bernard Lonergan, sj, Insight

Time that nurtures

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It’s important to be heroic, ambitious, productive, efficient, creative, and progressive, but these qualities don’t necessarily nurture the soul. The soul has different concerns, of equal value: downtime for reflection, conversation, and reverie; beauty that is captivating and pleasuring; relatedness to the environs and to people; and any animal’s rhythm of rest and activity.

Thomas Moore

How to develop calm in the heart

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A beautiful quote from the Buddha on how to develop our heart and move it towards happiness. We let go of the past’s hurts and our worries about the future by staying in the present. Then we hold whatever is happening within us,  in awareness, without getting hooked by it or identifying with it. Mindfulness is really re-mindfulness, remembering to come back, non-judgmentally, to the here-and-now. It allows us work with the inner fabric of what is happening in our heart and mind at this very moment.

You shouldn’t chase after the past
or place expectations on the future.
What is past is left behind.
The future is as yet unreached.
Whatever quality is present
you clearly see, right there,
right there.
Not taken in; unshaken.
That’s how you develop the heart.

Bhaddekaratta Sutta

Moving in the right direction

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Had a conversation this week which reminded me that not everything works out the way that we anticipate or wish. Life rarely proceeds so smoothly that we maintain the pure clarity or carefree existence which we glimpsed at times when we were children. It is much more complex – a succession  of ebbs and flows, of good moments and bad, of integrity and mixed motives.   In later life, the challenge is more that we reconcile the opposites that have emerged within us – the Shadow and the light, the steps forward with the setbacks – and transform them into a wholeness which allows us fully move on in  the project which is our life.  At times, however, it can be hard to see a positive direction in where we currently are, as the maps and guidelines which had guided us up to now seem hopelessly inadequate. A new paradigm is needed. We are forced to acknowledge the mystery and work out a path on our own, moving into a larger life and not the one we unconsciously thought had been mapped out for us.

Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!

 And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

Mary Oliver, Halleluiah.

The body needs a song, a soul….

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Have posted this poem before, but I saw this bird – the American Northern Cardinal – for the first time last week. Although, unlike Mary Oliver, I did not hear it sing, its bright colour still taught something about life, the heart, and the relationship between the body and the mind .

And this was my true task, to be the
music of the body.
Do you understand? for truly the body needs a song, a spirit, a soul.
And no less, to make this work,
the soul has need of a body,
and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable beauty of heaven where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes,
and this is why I have been sent,
to teach this to your heart.

Mary Oliver,  Red Bird