Tag: Joy

Build your own

Karl Duffy5 Comments

This is where we run into trouble in terms of being fulfilled… You have to make your own happiness, wherever you are.

Your job isn’t going to make you happy, your spouse isn’t going to make you happy, the weather isn’t going to make you happy… You have to decide what you want, and you have to find that way of doing it, whether or not the outside circumstances are going to participate in your success… You have to be able to create your own happiness, period.

Jonathan Fields, American author, in interview with Debbie Millman on the GoodLIfe Project

Big Mind

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

From the great Suzuki Roshi. A lot to ponder here but I do like the idea of seeing all that happens as an unfolding of big mind:

Because we enjoy all aspects of life as an unfolding of big mind,

we do not care for any excessive joy.

So we have imperturbable composure.

Shunryu Suzuki Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, 

Being with what is

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At any moment, whatever we are experiencing, only one of two things is ever happening: either we are being with what is, or else we are resisting what is.

Being with what is means letting ourselves have and feel our experience, just as it is right now. …

This is where genuine creativity, health, and communication, as well as spiritual power, arise from.

John Welwood

To know what one really needs

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows ‘what he wants,’ while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.

In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

A juicy creative life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

It’s time to get serious about joy and fulfillment, work on our books, songs, dances, gardens. But perfectionism is always lurking nearby, like the demonic prowling lion in the Old Testament, waiting to pounce.

Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written, or you didn’t go swimming in those warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart.

Don’t let this happen.


 Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, Instructions on Writing and lIfe

Even though

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Piglet noticed that even

though he had a very small heart,

it could hold a rather

large amount of gratitude.

A.A. Milne