Tag: inspiration

Do not prepare your joys

Karl Duffy3 Comments

The passion in this quote is striking. Each moment is there to be seized, to be discovered in all its depths. We can miss out if we spend our time anticipating moments of happiness elsewhere, or in the future. Indeed, too much focus on our aspirations for our future, our self-development and career paths, can create pressure and lead us into a habit of leaning away from this moment. Often all it succeeds in doing is making us unhappy with who we are.

Seize from each moment

its unique novelty

and do not prepare your joys.

André Gide

Looking for treasure outside ourselves

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We can spend a good portion of our life waiting for some time in the future when we have the time to do the things we want, or the things we feel are good for us. We look forward to our holidays, or to weekend seminars or to doing a course, believing that then we will finally get it together. It is rare that things actually happen in this way. The conditions are already available to us, in the moments of each day. We can start with where we are, not matter how messy that is, or how distracted we feel.

Solitude is not found so much by looking outside the boundaries of your own dwelling, as by staying within.  Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future.  Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

Simple Daily Practices: Schedule the time

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

 

If meditation is a priority, then it is helpful to take the word literally and put meditation first. An example would be my rule of not turning on the computer before I’ve meditated. Simple, but effective. Probably the most trenchant advice I ever heard was in eight words from Suzuki Roshi, “Organize your life so that you can sit well”.

Loaves and fishes

Karl Duffy1 Comment

This is not the age of information.
This is not the age of information.

Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.

This is the time of loaves
and fishes.

People are hungry,
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.

David Whyte, Loaves and Fishes from The House of Belonging

Just get there

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Try making a commitment to getting into the meditation posture at least once a day. You don’t have to sit for any length of time., just get on the cushion. A lot of times the hardest part is getting there.

Once you’re sitting down you think “I might as well sit for a few minutes” and more often than not, you’re getting full sessions in.

Joseph Goldstein in Commit to Sit

Simple Daily Practices: Transform your moments of waiting.

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

When we are forced to wait, say in a traffic jam, our instinct is to do something to distract ourselves from the discomfort of waiting. We turn on the radio, call or text someone on the phone, or just sit and fume. Practicing mindfulness while waiting helps people find many small moments in the day when they can bring the thread of awareness up from where is lies hiding in the complex fabric of their lives. Waiting, a common event that usually produces negative emotions, can be transformed into a gift, the gift of free time to practice. The mind benefits doubly: first, by abandoning negative mindstates, and second, by gaining the beneficial effects of even a few extra minutes of practice woven into the day.

Jan Chozen Bays