Tag: impermanence

We always think we need to do more..

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Our heart is often divided by doubt and our efforts go into what or how we should be, or into trying to prove ourselves. We need to dis-engage from this mind which produces narratives such as ‘I need to do more” and not hold on to notions of progress which require a perfect self-image:

Thomas Merton said the way we have structured our lives, we spend our whole life climbing up the ladder of supposed success, and when we get to the top of the ladder we realize it is leaning against the wrong wall — and there is nothing at the top. To get back to the place of inherent abundance, you have to let go of all of the false agendas, unreal goals, and passing self-images. It is all about letting go. The spiritual life is more about unlearning than learning, because the deepest you already knows.

Richard Rohr, The Art of Letting Go

We know and do not know

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Our minds are often very intent on knowing the outcome, on fixing things down into this or that:

Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what’s hidden.

Study them,
and enjoy this being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.

Rumi,  Story Water

You make the waves

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Very stormy weather in Ireland this past week, continuing overnight with heavy rain.  The Eastern tradition called the causes of emotional pain ‘worldly winds’: gusts of blame and loss, happiness and unhappiness. They blow through the heart and throw us off balance, making us feel that we never feel good enough where we are or how our life actually is:

Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble.

You yourself make the waves in your mind.

If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm.

This mind is called big mind.

Shunryu Suzuki

What to do in a storm of emotions

Karl Duffy4 Comments

Sometimes unexpected winds blow. It is best to find strength within oneself at moments like this:

You too are a tree. During a storm of emotions, you should not stay at the level of the head or the heart, which are like the top of the tree. You have to leave the heart, the eye of the storm, and come back to the trunk of the tree. Your trunk is one centimeter below your navel. Focus there, paying attention only to the movement of your abdomen, and continue to breathe.

Thích Nhat Hạnh

A way of holding things

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Express yourself completely, then keep quiet.

Strong winds do not last all morning,

And the heavy rains do not last all day.

What causes them?

Heaven and Earth.

If Heaven and Earth cannot make things last forever, 

How can we?

Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching

The weather forecast

Karl Duffy1 Comment

In Ireland we love talking about the weather, especially over a Bank Holiday weekend, as if Nature should have known to provided sunshine for our few days. Sometimes it can be a way of avoiding conversations with a real connection, but it can be a way of working with something which is always changing, in a country that has four seasons in an hour.

I never read weather forecasts. As soon as I read one, tomorrow is clouded for me, even if it is sunshine that’s predicted. A part of me is making plans, or second-guessing the heavens; a part of me is saying, “I should be able to get in a second walk tomorrow, though by Sunday night it’s going to be cold again.” When it turns out different, as it often will, all my thinking is in vain. 

It isn’t that weather forecasts mess with my mind. It’s that the mind is so ready to mess with everything it touches — to make theories around it, to draw fanciful conclusions from it, to play distorting games of projection and miscalculation — that even the elements are not safe from it. It has a supreme gift, I’ve found, for complicating the simple and muddying what could and should be transparent. It can take the tiniest detail and turn it into a drama or a universe of needless speculation. Most times I dread a coming moment, the moment never comes. It’s not the world that I need to change, I see, but the mayhem that my overactive mind makes of the world.

Pico Iyer, The Folly of the Weather Forecast