Tag: Joy

Faith in the possibilities of this day

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Being alive necessarily means uncertainty and risk, times of going into the unknown. If we withdraw from the flow of life, our hearts contract. We hold back so much that we feel separate from our own bodies and minds, separate from other people, even people we really care about. In the grip of other intense emotions, like grief and jealousy, we might feel anguish, but fear shuts us down, arrests the life-force. To be driven by fear is like dying inside. When the suffering is overwhelming, we may try to recoil from how bad it feels by numbing our reactions. Many of us survived childhood in just this way. But, ultimately, cutting ourselves off from what is happening locks us into fear and makes us unable to see that we might find another way to respond outside the small section delineated by the dots, defined by our assumptions.

Faith, in contrast, reminds us of the ever-changing flow of life, with all its movement and possibility. Faith is the capacity of the heart that allows us to draw close to the present and find there the underlying thread connecting the moment’s experience to the fabric of all of life. It opens us to a bigger sense of who we are and what we are capable of doing.

Sharon Salzberg, Faith

The Beauty in the cracks

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The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. Hemingway

Most of us are trying to live an authentic life. Deep down, we want to take off our game face and be real and imperfect. There is a line from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” that serves as a reminder to me when I get into that place where I’m trying to control everything and make it perfect. The line is, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” So many of us run around spackling all of the cracks, trying to make everything look just right. This line helps me remember the beauty of the cracks (and the messy house and the imperfect manuscript…). It reminds me that our imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together. Imperfectly, but together.

Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

Opening to the new year in front of us

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When we can establish an embodied openness, it’s a relief to have the personal world replaced with clear open space. When the movie of who we are turns off, there’s just the open mystery – and that’s wonderful. That’s how you really wake up; life is most alive when you can be present at the edge of the unknown. Death, separation, uncertainty – they’re all part of life……We have the original potential to handle, and in fact blossom, in the face of these. We don’t have to feel threatened, anxious, needy or inadequate. With wise openness, the main causes and conditions for human misery cease.

The gates to the good life are open. It’s only because we place so much emphasis on knowing what can’t be known – like the future (you can’t even know the next moment) and how other people are – that we close them. But when all is uncertain, all is possible. In such a light, wise openness is the most obvious faculty to develop, because the unknown is right here within and around us.

Ajahn Sucitto, Original Openness.

Sunday Quote: A motto for the year

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Expect nothing.

Live frugally on surprise.

Alice Walker


On not setting targets

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Again and again I therefore admonish my students in Europe and America: Don’t aim at success –  the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run … success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Genuine happiness comes from gently working with the mind

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If we could put as much effort into cleaning up our minds as we do sweeping our houses, washing our clothes and doing the dishes, we would likely be at ease. But when we talk about cleaning like this, people don’t know what we are getting at…I’ve come to think it’s because people don’t seek their own dwelling place. We scrub and sweep elsewhere. We don’t make our minds clean, so there is always confusion. We are always looking outside.

…These days there is only force and hurry. Mangoes are never sweet now. They are forced. Before they are ripe they picked and artificially ripened. This is done because people want to get them in a hurry. So when you eat them you find they are sour. To get something good, you have to allow it be sour first, according to its own natural way. But we pick them early and then complain that they are sour. For the most part things are imitations. We grasp the things that are false and uncertain as real…If the mind does not see and realize, there is no path to clarity. 

Ajahn Chah, Being Dharma