Tag: Joy

A joyful mind

Karl Duffy6 Comments

File:Greek Window (2414595505).jpg

This is the path we take in cultivating joy: learning not to armor our basic goodness, learning to appreciate what we have. Most of the time we don’t do this. Rather than appreciate where we are, we continually struggle and nurture our dissatisfaction. It’s like trying to get flowers to grow by pouring cement on the garden  A basic support for a joyful mind is curiosity, paying attention, taking an interest in the world around you. Happiness is not required, but being curious without a heavy judgmental attitude helps. Curiosity encourages cheering up.  We are so locked into this sense of burden — Big Deal Joy and Big Deal Unhappiness — that it’s sometimes helpful just to change the pattern. Anything out of the ordinary will help. You can go to the window and look at the sky, you can splash cold water on your face, you can sing in the shower, you can go jogging — anything that’s against your usual pattern. That’s how things start to lighten up.

Pema Chodron

photo Harold Hoyer

Create joy

Karl Duffy1 Comment

jumping

Life will bring you pain all by itself.

Your responsibility is to create joy

Milton Erikson, American Psychologist,

Being rather than doing

Karl Duffy1 Comment

baby steps

When people … put on masks, they hide their center from others and from themselves. They hide their source from themselves and from others. They hide their cry from others because somewhere they are inserted in society and they have their place and they are recognized in their power. So they wear a mask because they have a position to defend. Often their function is their mask. But when you are dying, you have no mask. It is a pity that we have to wait until our last breath to accept who we are!

Jean Vanier, Founder of the L’Arche Communities. 

Gently appreciating

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

child

If we are willing to take an unbiased look, we will find that, in spite of all of our problems and confusion, all our emotional and psychological ups and down, there is something basically good about our existence as human beings. Every human being has a basic nature of goodness, which is undiluted and unconfused. That goodness contains tremendous gentleness and appreciation.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Start to grow up

Karl Duffy1 Comment

walking child

We have to cultivate contentment with what we have. We really don’t need much. When you know this, the mind settles down. Cultivate generosity. Delight in giving. Learn to live lightly. In this way, we can begin to transform what is negative into what is positive. This is how we start to grow up.

Ani Tenzin Palmo

Journeys

Karl Duffy1 Comment

boat dunmore

This is the mystery and the pain of our lives: every one of us is exactly where we need to be, but we don’t know it. We’re looking for somewhere else to be. The spiritual odyssey, life’s deepest and most significant undertaking, involves a great effort and inevitably it leads us on through many disasters and troubles in the checkered course of our living and growing. And where to we end up? Back where we started from. Back to ourselves. Only now maybe with more wisdom.

Norman Fischer