Tag: Joy

Step through again and again

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

How do we work with this tendency to block and to freeze and to refuse to take another step toward the unknown? If our edge is like a huge stone wall with a door in it, how do we learn to open the door and step through it again and again, so that life becomes a process of growing up, becoming more and more fearless and flexible, more and more able to play like a raven in the wind?

The wilder the weather is, the more the ravens love it. They have the time of their lives in the winter, when the wind gets much stronger and there’s lots of ice and snow. They challenge the wind. They get up on the tops of the trees and hold on with their claws and then they grab on with their beaks as well. At some point they just let go into the wind and let it blow them away.  They have had to develop a zest for challenge and for life. 

Pema Chodron

photo Ingrid Taylar

Not dependent on everything going right

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:So happy smiling cat.jpg

Joy is that kind of happiness that does not depend on what happens.

David Steindal Rast, born 1926, Catholic monk,  founder of  A Network for Grateful Living

photo yumi kimura

Cheerfulness

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Laughter 2 by David Shankbone.jpg

A post for the made-up “Blue Monday”, the day in the year,  they tell us,  we are most likely to feel gloomy.

Perhaps the best advice for our physical and mental health this week, as we bring our inner self to work with whatever outward situation we find ourselves in…. and not from a modern self-help book. 

A cheerful heart is good medicine

Proverbs 17:22

photo david shankbone

The gentler way of nature

Karl Duffy1 Comment

leaves-on-ground

The first week back to work over. Nature has a gentler pace than the one imposed by our minds and seems to have  different phases – growth, slowing down,  covering over and rest. Thus, despite all the clamour to change we hear in these first weeks,  we can choose to have some natural rest and a time of quiet,  not always striving – allowing the different parts of our lives to just be .

You begin to see that there are seasons in your life, in the same way as there as seasons in nature. There are times to cultivate, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally there are those times that are cold and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are.

Chogram Trungpa Rinpoche, How to Rule

Fresh starts

Karl Duffy7 Comments

File:Love-romantic-date-candlelight (23958771669).jpg

A friend reminded me yesterday that it is all about starting each day anew, with fresh eyes –  like lighting a candle in the darkness and seeing things in the glow of a kind light:

I’m heading into 2017 aspiring to look at life through the eyes of a child. Buddhists call it “beginner’s mind” — a corrective to the cynicism that comes when we let hard realities darken our vision and diminish our imagination. It’s a way of looking at the world that doesn’t deny the darkness, but makes fresh starts possible in everything – from our personal to our political lives.

What’s “the growing edge” in your life?

Whatever it is, may 2017 be a year in which our adult powers dance with our child-like imaginations to help make all things new.

Parker Palmer

With thanks to makebelieveboutique.com

Setting out in trust

Karl Duffy1 Comment

path

We sometimes think we know the way we are going….

A person often meets his destiny on the road which he takes to avoid it

L‘homme rencontre souvent son destin sur la route qu’il emprunte pour l’éviter

Jean de la Fontaine, 1621 – 1695, French poet and writer of Fables