Tag: Life

A spacious awareness

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Lac Leman

Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance. If we are holding back from any part of our experience, if our heart shuts out any part of who we are and what we feel, we are fuelling the fears and feelings of separation that sustain the trance of unworthiness. Since non-acceptance is the very nature of the trance, we might wonder how, when we feel most stuck, we take the first step out of it. The very nature of our awareness is to know what is happening. Like a boundless sea, we have the capacity to embrace the waves of life as they move through us. Even when the sea is stirred up by the winds of self-doubt, we can find our way home. We can discover in the midst of the waves, our spacious and wakeful awareness.

Tara Brach

With thanks to Ellen van Kalmthout for sending me the beautiful photo of Lac Leman for use on the blog.

Dont Know Mind II

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Blue mountains and forest.jpg

Who makes these changes?

I shoot and arrow right, it lands left

I ride after a deer and find myself

chased by a boar.

I plot to get what I want

and end up in prison.

I dig pits to trap others

and fall in myself.

I should be suspicious

of what I want.

Rumi

Dont know Mind I

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Great_Egret_%28Ardea_alba%29_chicks_with_parent_in_nest%2C_Morro_Bay_H_%282594536724%29.jpg

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.

To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.

Pema Chodron

photo mike baird

The secret ingredient of happiness

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Zahncremes.jpg

The most prophetic thing Thomas Merton ever did was to say to a Louisville shopkeeper who asked him what brand of toothpaste he preferred, “I don’t care”. Merton was intrigued and troubled by the store clerk’s response. “He almost dropped dead” he wrote,  “I was supposed to feel strongly about Colgate or Pepsodent or something with five colours. And they all have a secret ingredient. But I didn’t care about the secret ingredient ….the worst thing you can do now is not care about these things”

This not-caring attitude is important to hold onto these days and still prophetic, because the ultimate goal of the marketer is to have us see consumer products not as mere things, but as keys to our identity.  Brands are marks that owners out on their property, often by painful means, and we are in perilous territory when our self-image, and even our self-worth, is founded on which brands and labels we can afford to purchase and display.

Kathleen Norris, The Secret Ingredient

Starting over, new again

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Moonrise on Hobart Bay - NOAA.jpg

The soul, like the moon,
is now, and always new again.

And I have seen the ocean
continuously creating.

Since I scoured my mind
and my body, I too, Lalla,
am new, each moment new.

My teacher told me one thing,
live in the soul.

When that was so,
I began to go naked,
and dance.

Lalla, Kasmiri poet and mystic, 1320 – 1392

Original Kasmiri translated by Coleman Banks

Losing our way and finding our home

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Swallows' nest.jpg

When we moved into our house last autumn there was the remnants of a swallows nest in the porch over the door. And shortly after the first swallows  were seen back in Ireland this year, two of them started rebuilding the nest and getting it ready for use once again.  We look up at them and are heartened. They know how to get from somewhere far away all the way back here. They are faithful to a place and constant in their determination. And that clarity seems to us to be something desirable. We frequently lose our way and – more often than we would like to admit –  change our mind and our mood, sometimes from hour to hour. For most of us,  finding the correct path seems quite hard. We do not get it right unerringly year after year. We are a mix, we stumble, make mistakes and often have to change direction. Life is, in many ways, a long trek, and we all have periods when we are not sure who we are or where we are going, or even where we have come from. There are no maps, no clear GPS directions. And furthermore, there is no-one with a crystal ball who can show us the future or guide our current choices or give us the best answers to the mysteries which confront us.

So firstly, we have to be gentle with ourselves as ones who frequently get lost. But we also have to be clear on how much certainty and control we can get on our journey. The notion that we can ever find a full sense of security,  a firm hold on where we are going may not, in fact,  be as important as letting go and being found, of having something that holds us. It may be the case that trust in the present moment, rather than full knowledge, is the way we travel here. Even if it feels shaky, here and now is always the steadiest place to start, not our ideas about how we are doing. We can have an awareness of whatever is happening, including the sense of being lost, and that awareness is our place of refuge. It give us a sense of groundedness which is a necessary counterbalance to the constant sense of movement which is associated with time. Gradually it becomes a spacious home inside ourselves, even as we travel along  – a place of inner peace,  that the changing mind states on our journey  cannot trouble.

My real dwelling

Has no pillars

And no roof either

So rain cannot soak it

And wind cannot blow it down.

Ikkyu, 1394 – 1481, Japanese Zen Buddhist monk and poet