Tag: impermanence

Release from effort

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:AutumnLeaf2.JPG

Remind yourself to loosen up your opinions about what you think you are doing or where you think you are going. This is a practice that can be done informally, with regular reminders to yourself throughout the day. Or you can do a formal ‘wandering’ practice: Sitting in an upright posture, allow yourself to be with your breath, your body and all your sense perceptions, thoughts and emotions. You can notice how all these experiences come and go, as long as you don’t try to hold onto any of them. This is a practice of release from effort, and allows a sense of peace and not-knowing to arise naturally.

Melissa Myozen Backer Roshi in Richard Fields, A Year of Living Mindfully

 photo: brookie

Where to let go

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Flickr - law keven - Make a Wish....jpg

A big change in the Irish weather these last few days. Wet and very windy,  and consequently the leaves are finally giving up their clinging and letting go. It prompts me to reflect on whether a certain lightness in how I hold some things –  like how I turn my opinions into a solid identity  or how I try to fix  into a definite storyline as to how a meeting or a process should turn out,  how I like things fixed in a world that is always changing  –   can reduce some of the emotional charge which arises from time to time.

Every year, everything
I have ever learned in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side is salvation,

whose meaning none of us will ever know.
To live in this world you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods

How do we arrive at non-agitation through non-clinging? When the instructed person does not regard form with these words: “This is mine, this I am, this is my self.”

The form of his changes and alters, but with the change and alteration of form, sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure and despair do not arise.

The Buddha, S 22.8
photo keven law

Roots

Karl Duffy1 Comment

tree roots wood

The rooting (of trees, of our selves) is as important and as necessary as the rising. We have the opportunity to sink roots into soul and rise up with branches in heaven…..Growth is meant to go in both directions, toward the fertile darkness and the glorious light, each of us having the opportunity to bridge earth and heaven — the underworld and the upperworld — through the trunks of our middleworld lives…. There’s no conflict between spirit-centered being and soulful doing, between transcendence and inscendence. Each supports and enhances the other. Like Rilke, we discover we can have both:

You see, I want a lot
Maybe I want it all;
The darkness of each endless fall,
The shimmering light of each ascent.

Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft

An idea for a new month: Give up defining

Karl Duffy1 Comment

blowing-leaves

Give up defining yourself – to yourself or to others.

You won’t die. You will come to life. And don’t be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it’s their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don’t be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

Step back

Karl Duffy1 Comment

step back

Liberation ….is a process of mentally, emotionally, stepping back from any state and seeing it just as a state, without reactions and attitudes.

This simple skill, which most of us can do from time to time, is what we develop in … practice.

Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma

Lost in our moods

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File:Leaf on tree in Yosemite park.jpg

This mind of ours is naturally peaceful. It’s still and calm like a leaf that is not being blown about by the wind…

Why the mind doesn’t feel peaceful right now is because it gets lost in its own moods. There’s nothing to mind itself. It simply abides in its natural state, that’s all. That sometimes the mind feels peaceful and other times not peaceful is because it has been tricked by moods. The untrained mind lacks wisdom.  Moods come and trick it into feeling pleasure one minute and suffering the next. Happiness then sadness. But the natural state of a person’s mind isn’t one of happiness or sadness. This experience of happiness and sadness is not the actual mind itself, but just these moods which have tricked it. The mind gets lost, carried away by these moods with no idea what’s happening.  It still isn’t very clever. And we go on thinking that it’s our mind which is suffering or our mind which is happy, when actually it’s just lost in its various moods.

Ajahn Chah, Training this Mind