Tag: impermanence

The painful illusion

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Our sense of incompletion comes not from lacking something, but from the stubborn and relentless act of comparing ourselves to others. The flower doesn’t look at its neighbor and think, I should be taller, or redder, or more like a rose. It just unfolds in the sun, moment by moment, wholly itself.

We, however, are caught in the painful illusion that we must be better than or different from who we are to be worthy of love. But the lesson of the flower is clear: There is no other. There is only this – this moment, this self, this blooming.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

trust the process

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Alert to the needs of the journey

those on the path of awareness

like swans, glide on,

leaving behind their former resting places

Dhammapada 91

Relaxing into the flow

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Everything changes. This is the first law of life. When we resist this truth, we suffer.

But when we relax into the flow of the present – allowing each moment to arise and pass without clinging – we discover a paradoxical stability: the ground of being that never leaves us.

David Richo, The Five Things We Cannot Change… and the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them

No longer expecting

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Sometimes when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise – we somehow embrace the notion that this vale of tears, that it’s perfectable – you’re not gonna get it all straight.

I found that things got a lot easier when I no longer expected to win….

You understand that, you abandon your masterpiece, and you sink into the real masterpiece…

Leonard Cohen

awareness

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Suffering does not belong to awareness; it belongs only to the illusory separate self.

When a thought or feeling appears and we say, ‘This is my sadness,’ we have already misidentified awareness as a person who owns an experience.

But awareness itself is free of suffering – it is like the sky that remains untouched by the storm clouds passing through it.

To abide as awareness is to be free of suffering, not because suffering is denied, but because it is no longer claimed as ‘mine‘

Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware 

a decision

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

I’m a big proponent of “busy is a decision.”

You decide what you want to do and the things that are important to you.

And you don’t find the time to do things – you make the time to do things. And if you aren’t doing them because you’re “too busy,” it’s likely not as much of a priority as what you’re actually doing.

Debbie Milman, radio show host and author