Tag: impermanence

The end of a work year: Let it unravel

Karl Duffy1 Comment

[When] you get to the end of a meeting, a day, let that unravel. You cultivate the wisdom of no-performance and no-result. You listen to any judgements that are rattling in your mind, establish mindfulness on the mind-state and its feeling, then let the defenses and identities go. 

It’s a matter of acknowledging the inner helicopter that is hovering over ‘If only this’ and ‘I should have said that’ and ‘How dare they do this!’ and steadily touching the ground. Allow the feeling to be felt and breathe through it. Let it end, even let the wish that it all end come to an end. When the rotor blades stop, just here, on the other side of failure, is purity and release.

Ajahn Sucitto, Happy Deathday

Mid winter

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty…. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting – is a radical act now, but it’s essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that skin will harden around you.

It’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make.

Katherine May, Wintering: How I Learned to Flourish When Life Became Frozen 

Reassurance

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The reason why men are so anxious to see themselves,

instead of being content to be themselves,

is that they do not really believe in their own existence. 

Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s True Life

Nothing fixed

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A monk asked “What is the substance of a true person?”

The Master said “Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter”

The monk said “Put like that, it is hard for me to understand”

The Master said “You asked about the substance of a true person, didnt you?”

Traditional Zen koan dialogue

The accumulation of unnecessary goods

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As the author says, we need to change our stories.

[The] four stories at the heart of western imperial civilisation….have profound ecological implications.

There is the ‘prosperity story’ which promotes worship of material acquisition and money, the ‘biblical story’ which focuses on the afterlife rather than the world around us, the ‘security story’ which builds up the military and police to protect relationships of domination, and the ‘secular meaning story’ which reduces life to matter and mechanism.

These are not, however, stories in the usual sense of narratives. They exist behind and between the lines of the texts that surround us – the news reports that describe the ‘bad news’ about a drop in Christmas sales, or the ‘good news’ that airline profits are up…

[…] underneath common ways of writing and speaking in industrial societies are stories about unlimited economic growth as being not just possible but the goal of society, of the accumulation of unnecessary goods as a path towards self-improvement, of progress and success defined narrowly in terms of technological innovation and profit, and of nature as something separate from humans, a mere stock of resources to be exploited.

Arran Stibbe, Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By

always analysing

Karl Duffy1 Comment

My immediate response to most situations is with reactions of defensiveness, control and analysis.

I am better at calculating than contemplating.

Lets admit that we all start there

The false self seems to have the “first gaze” at almost everything

Richard Rohr