Tag: Joy

Taking deliberate action

Karl Duffy2 Comments

One of the problems of contemporary culture is that life moves at such a quick pace, we usually don’t give ourselves time to feel and listen deeply. You may have to take deliberate action to nurture the soul. If you want to increase your soul’s bank account, you may have to seek out the unfamiliar and do things that at first could feel uncomfortable. Give yourself time as you experiment. How will you know if you’re on the right track? I like Rumi’s counsel: ‘When you do something from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.

Elizabeth Lesser,  The Seeker’s Guide: Making Your Life A Spiritual Adventure

Sunday Quote: Acceptance

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The summit of happiness is reached

when a person is ready to be what he or she  is

Erasmus

A short meditation exercise for when you feel under pressure

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Close your eyes gently. Let your body be at rest and your breathing be natural. Begin to listen to the play of sounds around you. Notice those that are loud or soft, far and near. Notice how sounds arise and vanish on their own, leaving no trace. 

After you have listened for a few minutes, let yourself sense, feel or imagine that your mind is not limited to your head. Sense that your mind is expanding to be open like the sky – clear, vast like space.  Feel that your mind extends outwards beyond the most distant sounds. Imagine there are no boundaries to your mind, no inside or outside. Let the awareness of your mind extend in every direction, like the sky.

 Relax in this openness and just listen. Let every sound you hear – people, the breeze, your breath – arise and pass away like a could in the open space of your mind.  Let thoughts and feelings – pleasant, unpleasant – come and go without resistance or struggle. Relax and rest in this openness.  Let sensations float and change. Pay attention to consciousness itself. Notice how the open space of awareness is clear, transparent, timeless and without conflict – allowing for all things, but not limited by them. This is your own true nature. Rest in it. Trust it. It is home.

Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart

Sunday Quote: Each moment

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How we spend our days is,

of course,

how we spend our lives.

Annie Dilliard

What happens when the train stops

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Maybe it’s like this for many people. A day rattles by full of this and that, like an old freight train. And at the end of it, it parks itself at no final destination still carrying the cargo. Sleep is an untidy mish-mash of dreams. To wake in the middle of the night, even with someone sleeping beside you, is to sense loss and uncertainty.  It may seem that that’s the way life has to go; that we have to be busy. However, it’s also the case that we choose to be. In order to jump over the gap that yawns open when the activity or the engagement stops, most people have an array of hobbies, gadgets or books. Even more tellingly, if these fillers aren’t available the mind fills with discordant thoughts and dissonant emotions. One of the worst ordinary things that happen for someone is to be left waiting somewhere without a friend, say at an airport, with nothing to do and no-one to talk to. Restlessness grabs hold; or loneliness, worries, and unresolved emotions. 
 
So thank goodness for meditation, which offers a way to steady and clear the mind. Meditation also gets us to recognize a fundamental property of consciousness: that although that mind-stream may carry all kinds of creatures and a lot of rubbish, its ‘water’ is clear. To be more prosaic – we can watch, or witness the movements and content of the mind. There is an awareness of the flow of mental content, from the sublime to the ridiculous, heavens and hells; and also a detachment from being that flow. In meditation, when you recognize this normal property – awareness – it feels like an important realization. Sometimes it’s seen as the only valid and necessary realization. We can be ‘that which knows.’
Ajahn Sucitto

Being fully where we are

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Ego could be defined as whatever covers up basic goodness. From an experiential point of view, what is ego covering up? It’s covering up our experience of just being here, just fully being where we are, so that we can relate with the immediacy of our experience. Egolessness is a state of mind that has complete confidence in the sacredness of the world. It is unconditional well-being, unconditional joy that includes all the different qualities of our experience.

Pema Chodron.