Tag: Joy

Steps

Karl Duffy4 Comments

In order to have peace and joy, you must succeed in having peace within each of your steps.  Your steps are the most important thing.  They decide everything. But often in our daily life, our steps are burdened with anxieties and fears.  Life itself seems to be a continuous chain of insecure feelings, and so our steps lose their natural easiness.  Our earth is truly beautiful.  There is so much graceful, natural scenery along paths and roads around the earth!   They are all available to us, yet we cannot enjoy them because our hearts are not trouble-free, and our steps are not at ease.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Seeing that change is just part of life

Karl DuffyLeave a comment
Just as there are seasons in the world around us, so there are in our interior life.     Teresa of Avila

We can learn a lot around the change of the seasons, as in these days when Winter gives way to Spring. Not just the ongoing lesson about change and impermanence but from the fact that there is a parallel between our interior rhythm and the movement of the seasons. Winter is a time for conserving energy and reducing activity, whereas,  in some Eastern Wisdom traditions,  Spring is seen as having an energy which is expansive and outward moving. It is a time of new beginnings and potentially a renewal of spirit. And all around us we begin to see this, as there is a delicate but still fragile sense of renewal and new life. We see seeds beginning to sprout, flowers bloom, and the sun gently warming the earth. And we begin to see that despite the darkness and cold much has been going on unseen and underground for months. However, we also see the harm which the severe cold has done to some of the plants, who need cutting back or digging up. We too start again, making room for change, moving towards a sense of lightness, letting go of unhelpful habits of mind which hold us back or no longer give life.

There are seasons in your life in the same way as there are seasons in nature. There are times to cultivate and create, 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 fade. And finally, of course, there are times of cold and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream.

These 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. If you realize that each phase of your life is a natural occurrence, then you need not be swayed, pushed up and down by the changes in circumstance and mood that life brings.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, How to Rule

Inner work is the key to happiness

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The way to solve the problem isn’t through trying to make everything right and pleasant on the external dimension,

but to develop the right understanding, the right attitude towards ourselves.

Ajahn Sumedho

Inner and outer life on the first day of Spring

Karl Duffy1 Comment

This morning two birds
fell down the side of the maple tree

like a tuft of fire, a wheel of fire
a love knot out of control as they plunged through the air
pressed against each other
and I thought

how I meant to live a quiet life
how I meant to live a life of mildness and meditation
tapping the careful words against each other

and I thought—
as though I were suddenly spinning, like a bar of silver
as though I had shaken my arms and lo! they were wings—

of the Buddha
when he rose from his green garden
when he rose in his powerful ivory body

when he turned to the long dusty road without end
when he covered his hair with ribbons and the petals of flowers
when he opened his hands to the world.

Mary Oliver, Spring

We always want something different

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Suffering is the desire for more choices than reality offers, but reality is without options. Our mind creates mental alternatives when there are none in reality, and we do so by bargaining with reality through our desires and fears. The sense-of-self comes into play when we think that reality can be altered. As we consider the options we take ourselves out of the state of abiding within the moment into acting on the moment. When the moment becomes adversarial, we become self invested and determined to do something about it. This creates a sense of someone being on one side and reality being on the other, as if life was happening to us.

Rodney Smith, Stepping out of Self-Deception

A need for the timeless

Karl Duffy1 Comment

One of the signs of work that’s debilitating is when you feel constantly besieged by time, when you are constantly trying to fit your work into a schedule. Now there’s no work that is immune to the sense of deadline or of being limited. But if you don’t have a cyclical visitation of the timeless in your endeavours, I’d say that’s a pretty good sign it’s not your conversation, it’s not your work and you should be elsewhere. Or you should move on from something that perhaps once brought that into your life but no longer does.  The whole idea of pilgrimage is not necessarily moving on from a particular form of conversation, but finding – and I do think work is a kind of out loud, visible conversation – it’s keeping that conversation real, and in order to do that, finding new forms appropriate to it.

David Whyte