Tag: Life

Losing our ground

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Our lives suffer from a lack of meaning that disguises itself as consumerism and a host of other addictions. Having lost our spiritual grounding […] we experience our groundlessness as an unbearable lightness of being. The tragic dialectic between security and freedom reasserts itself: having attained some measure of self-determination and confronted the lack at its core, we now crave the grounding that would connect our own aspirations with something greater than ourselves.

David Loy, A Buddhist History of the West

Seeing what is hidden

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Heavy mist over lake Kaviskis (Lithuania).jpg

Meditation, simply defined, is a way of being aware. It is the happy marriage of doing and being. It lifts the fog of our ordinary lives to reveal what is hidden; it loosens the knot of self-centredness and opens the heart; it moves us beyond mere concepts to allow for a direct experience of reality. Meditation embodies the way of awakening: both the path and its fruition. From one point of view it is the means to awakening; from another it is awakening itself.

Lama Surya Das, The Heart of Meditation

Driven by challenge

Karl Duffy3 Comments

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We need to periodically ask, “What wants to come into the world through me?” This is not an ego-driven, narcissistic question. It is a query which summons us to show up, to serve something larger than the familiar, the comfortable. Surely one of the most telling tests of our lives is whether we are living in a way which is driven more by challenge than by comfort, one which asks more of us than we had planned to offer.

James Hollis, Embracing the New: Avoiding a Routinized Life

Our actual life

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

supermarket_check_outWherever you are

that is the entry point

Kabir

Storms of life

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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Strong weather systems here in Ireland, the UK, and in the US,  dominate the news headlines. A reminder that a lot of things are outside our control and an insight into the fact that impermanence is a part of life:  calm and storm, darkness and light, cold and warmth.

The capacity to suffer wounding and learn to adapt to it is crucial to the development of self. . . We have wounds, and the clusters of energy that accompany them, because we have a life history. The deeper question is whether we have the wounds or they have us.

James Hollis, The Eden Project.

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Your natural mind

Karl Duffy6 Comments

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If you don’t try to stop whatever is going on in your mind, but merely observe it, eventually you’ll begin to feel a tremendous sense of relaxation, a vast sense of openness within your mind – which is in fact your natural mind, the naturally unperturbed background against which various thoughts come and go.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.