Tag: heart

Life bears fruit

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Sometimes, things planted many years only make sense and bear fruit much later. Autumn teaches the virtue of waiting:

Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.

To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.

And however sharply
you are tested – 
this sorrow, that great love  –
it too will leave on that clean knife.

Jane Hirshfield, Ripeness

Time to take your turn

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Giving up some conditioned behaviour patterns is also good:

You didn’t come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren’t born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose — paid but good. It is now your turn to reap.

I never used to take my turn. I always gave my turn away. I helped others have a great turn. I must have had a clipboard by the time I was six, because by then I had a whole caseload of people to keep track of. After they had all gotten a turn, then maybe I could go, if there was time and it didn’t bother anyone.

Now I take my turn, as a radical act.

Anne Lamott, Stitches

We cannot do everything

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It is good to tune into the energy of each season and live in harmony with it.  In autumn we move from the expansive nature of summer to a more internal, introspective focus, setting limits, conserving and harvesting.  A good time to let go of the unrealistic demands we place on ourselves.

There is a Japanese saying: The elbow does not bend outward.

It is a smart saying. The freedom of the elbow, the wonderfulness of the elbow, is precisely because of its limitations. This is our awakened attitude. We are free to be completely human. We are not free to be aliens or cartoon creatures.

We are free to be ourselves, with all of our imperfections and bruises.

Jason Shulman, The Instruction Manual for Receiving God

Let go of unworthiness

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The sense of unworthiness, it seems, comes out of our being talked out of, trained out of, conditioned out of trusting our natural being. It is the result of being turned away from ourselves, taught to distrust ourselves. We are worthy of letting go of our unworthiness. If we did nothing but practice letting go of unworthiness, much of the stuff we’re working so hard to clear away would have no support system. We would have more room to grow. Consciously we surrender unworthiness as it arises, not entertaining it with the ego’s list of credits. the work which will awaken us is that of becoming keenly aware of unworthiness without judging it. 

Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening

An empty mind

Karl Duffy3 Comments

To see the empty nature of mind is liberating. It’s like a room full of furniture. Originally the room is empty. The furniture is brought in piece by piece. The person living there knows that anything they brought into the room can also be taken out — chairs, beds, tables, and so on. Similarly anything brought into the mind by prior causes and conditions can be taken out — afflictive emotions… all kinds of suffering. Nothing is stuck. This empty nature is the direct route to freedom. Once we know it, it is only a question of doing the work. As Suzuki Roshi put it, “People who know the state of emptiness will always be able to dissolve their problems by constancy.” Constancy here means continuing with our practice of right effort. Once we know the peace of an empty mind, we only need to keep letting go of the sources of suffering. The field of awareness, like vast space, is intrinsically empty. 

Guy Amstrong, in his new book,  Emptiness, A Practical Guide for Meditators

A good attitude for the week

Karl Duffy1 Comment

If you don’t like something, change it.

If you can’t change it, change your attitude.

Don’t complain.

Maya Angelou