Tag: Joy

And letting go of our habitual fears

Karl Duffy2 Comments

The sense of splendidness arises from feeling our wealth. We have confidence in our inherent goodness — the beating heart of each individual and all humanity… The energy of splendidness comes from being fully present in whatever we do. My father, Chögyam Trungpa,  put it this way: “You are not hiding anywhere.” Hiding means our splendidness is obscured by embedded habitual patterns. One characteristic of hiding is that we are always self-observing. Self-observing comes from not trusting our inherent goodness, and therefore keeping the reins tight on our mind. It is different from awareness or introspection because in observing ourselves this way, we are not really sensing or feeling the moment. We lack the lucidity to simply be splendid, so we tighten up and hide. We have half-thoughts and half-emotions. When we do experience something wholly and completely, it is disconcerting and disorienting.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Let it Shine!

Letting go our story lines

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The essence of practice is always the same:
instead of falling prey to a chain reaction
of revenge or hatred,
we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction
and drop the story lines.

Pema Chodron

Protection schemes

Karl Duffy2 Comments

It’s important to recognize that all the emotional and psychological wounding we carry with us from the past is relational in nature: It has to do with not feeling fully loved. And it happened in our earliest relationships — with our caretakers — when our brain and body were totally soft and impressionable. As a result, the ego’s relational patterns have largely developed as protection schemes to insulate us from the vulnerable openness that love entails. In relationship the ego acts as a survival mechanism for getting needs met while fending off the threat of being hurt, manipulated, controlled, rejected, or abandoned in ways we were as a child. This is normal and totally understandable. Yet if it’s the main tenor of a relationship, it keeps us locked into complex strategies of defensiveness and control that undermine the possibility of deeper connection. Thus to gain greater access to the gold of our nature in relationship, a certain alchemy is required: the refining of our conditioned defensive patterns.

John Welwood, Intimate Relationship as a Spiritual Crucible 

Not depending on something else to make us happy

Karl Duffy2 Comments

In Tibet they have a saying, “The joy of a king is no greater than the joy of a beggar”.  It isn’t what we possess — it’s what we enjoy. This means the experience of genuine cheerfulness cannot be bought or sold. What makes it genuinely cheerful is that we are free from fixation and attachment. We are free of having to depend on something else to make us happy. We can bask freely in the natural radiance of our mind. This is the equanimity of true cheerfulness — nothing more, nothing less.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, The Power of Being Cheerful

The one who knows

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Every time I reacted negatively, pushing things away, that action implied that there was something to fear. That this feeling or this thought was dangerous; that it was going to really hurt me, or invade me; that it was something that was really me and mine. As I began to welcome it all I realised that when you accept everything, only then can you sense that, after all, there is nothing to fear. None of it really belongs to a self or comes from a self. It cannot touch the mind which knows, cannot affect its nature. Whatever shape of vessel you pour the water into, with this same total accommodation, the water changes to the shape of the bottle. It doesn’t say: ‘I will not be poured into a square bottle, square bottles are not my scene. Round bottles only, please!’  When there is complete acceptance, there is just the sense of being the knowing, being that which is aware of all that comes through the mind.

Ajahn Amaro

Staying with where our life is at this moment

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Consciously or unconsciously,

we avoid facing things as they are in themselves

and so we want God to open for us a door which is beyond…

(But) to find life’s purpose we must go through the door of ourselves.

Krishnamurti