Tag: Joy

Doors that open

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

dark_windowEither you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.

Adrienne Rich, Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Why disruption is good

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Carnival ride upside down.jpg

The Beloved sometimes wants to do us a great favour:

hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out

Hafiz

Image : Flickruser Brent and MariLynn

Space

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bird flying33

When we start to develop mindfulness, we are able to extend the sense of our domain beyond the seeming limitations of our body, of our immediate space. Try to understand that for most of human history, we have lived in larger spaces, like the  wide valleys that occupy great physical space. We have the capacity to hear, see, smell, and taste and to know intuitively. We lived as communities. And it has been only a very short time that we have cut ourselves off from that, that we have lived in little separate boxes and have a very narrow sense of our mission and ourselves. We all still long for that connection. We all still yearn to have that more expansive sense of belonging and anchoring, spaciousness and connectedness. It is not that difficult to create. In meditation  we create a sacred space, and the longer we abide in it, the more those old powerful urges and natural states of being emerge in us. And we begin to understand the nature of things and of change on a refined and profound level.

Steven Smith, Wise Navigating Through Change

Keeping here

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

daffodils11

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today; 

And give us not to think so far away 

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here 

All simply in the springing of the year.

Robert Frost

As Spring arrives

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springtime1

The best way to ‘get somewhere,’ to make progress in meditation — and that’s a dangerous way to think about it — is to just begin to pay attention, moment to moment, with less judgment.

Jon Kabat Zinn

The heart of our practice

Karl Duffy1 Comment

colourful-spring-flowersYou have to trust this simple ability that we all have to be fully present and fully awake, and begin to recognize the grasping, and the ideas we have taken on about ourselves, about the world around us, about our thoughts and perceptions and feelings. The way of mindfulness is the way of recognizing conditions just as they are. We simply recognize and acknowledge their presence, without blaming them or judging them, without criticizing them or praising them. We allow them to be, both the positive and the negative.

When I started practicing meditation I felt I was somebody who was very confused, and I wanted to get out of this confusion and get rid of my problems and become someone who was a clear thinker and might one day become enlightened. But then, reflecting on this position that “I am somebody who needs to do something,” I began to see it as a created condition — it was an assumption that I had created:  “I am somebody who needs to do something in order to become enlightened in the future.” Just by recognizing this as an assumption I created, that which is aware knows it is something created out of ignorance, or not understanding. When we see and recognize this fully, then we stop creating the assumptions. Awareness is not about making value judgments about our thoughts or emotions or actions or speech. Awareness is about knowing these things fully — that they are what they are, at this moment.

Ajahn Sumedho