Tag: Joy

Things fall apart

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Not everything goes smoothly everyday or in our life history. However, it seems to be a fact that painful situations have the capacity to help us reflect better than pleasant occasions when everything is going smoothly and positively. Indeed, our quest for an easy life without change is a mistaken one, as change is inevitable, even on a daily level. Wisdom comes when we begin to see that our full growth can include holding the painful aspects of our lives in awareness and not pushing them away, as our natural instinct sometimes demands. It is not only pleasant insights that lead to growth. To grow whole we have to go beneath the surface of neat appearance and enter deeply into our hearts and our history.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Pema Chodron

Where you are, and not judging it

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The path is something we cultivate. We have to know where we are and not try to become something that we think we would like to be; we have to practise with the way it is now, without making a judgement about it. If you’re feeling tense, nervous, disillusioned, disappointed about yourself or whatever, then try to recognise that what is in the moment is enough. Be willing to just admit, to acknowledge the way it is,  rather than to indulge in believing that what you’re feeling is somehow an accurate description of reality, or to feel that what you are feeling is wrong and you shouldn’t be feeling like that. Those are two extremes. But the cultivation of the way is to recognise that whatever is subject to arising is subject to ceasing. And this isn’t a put-down or cold-hearted way of cultivating the path, even though it might sound like it.

Ajahn Sumedho

What is, is good enough.

Karl Duffy1 Comment

In both Western and Eastern traditions, happiness is less about feeling good than about an attitude of acceptance of life the way it is. Happiness comes from accepting what is , in contrast to pursuing what is not yet. To penetrate life means to get into it with a focused power and precision, like a laser beam. As Thoreau indicated, it means “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life”. If we truly practice his favorite principle –  less is more, simpler is better – we sooner or later come upon the subtler principle it reveals: what is,  is good enough.

 Less is more, simpler is better, works precisely because whatever exists without our inflating and overcomplicating it, is good enough. Zen alludes to this principle when it says  “The beauty of a mountain is that it is so much like a mountain, and of water, that it is so much like water”.  Simply stated, life is simply good.

Michael Gellert, The Way of the Small

Ending confusion: How to find the meaning in life

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Separated by centuries and traditions,  but the same message:

The meaning of life is to see

Hui Neng ( Chinese Zen monk, 7th century).

The whole of life lies in the verb “seeing”

Teilhard de Chardin, (Jesuit priest, 20th Century).

Devotion proceeds through various stages of unmasking until we reach the point of seeing the world directly and simply without imposing our fabrications.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Confusion: Seeking outside for what can only come from within

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The confused heart, having lost joy within itself, seeks…..consolation outside.

The more it seeks exterior goods, the more it lacks the interior joy to which it can return

Hugh Feiss, osb

Today – notice something you never noticed before

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….Go into the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before….

A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

Live with the beetle, and the wind.

Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud: A Poem