Tag: Life

Give yourself a break this weekend

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

It’s important to acknowledge mistakes, feel appropriate remorse, and learn from them so they don’t happen again. But most people keep beating themselves up way past the point of usefulness: they’re unfairly self-critical. Inside the mind are many sub-personalities. For example, one part of me might set the alarm clock for 6 am to get up and exercise . . . and then when it goes off, another part of me could grumble: “Who set the darn clock?” More broadly, there is a kind of inner critic and inner protector inside each of us. For most people, that inner critic is continually yammering away, looking for something, anything, to find fault with. It magnifies small failings into big ones, punishes you over and over for things long past, ignores the larger context, and doesn’t credit you for your efforts to make amends.

Therefore, you really need your inner protector to stick up for you: to put your weaknesses and misdeeds in perspective, to highlight your many good qualities surrounding your lapses, to encourage you to keep getting back on the high road even if you’ve gone down the low one, and – frankly – to tell that inner critic to Shut Up.

Rick Hanson, The Art of Self-forgiveness

Tuning in to ourselves

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Perhaps the most common and pernicious form of non-listening is our non-listening to ourselves. So much of what we actually feel and think is unacceptable to us. We have been actually conditioned over a lifetime to simply not hear all our own self-pity, anger, desire, jealousy, wonder. Most of what we take to be our adult response is no more than our unconscious decision not to listen to what goes on inside us. And as with any human relationship, not listening to ourselves damages our self-respect. To allow ourselves to feel what we actually do feel – not to be afraid or dismayed but to open up a space inside our hearts large enough to safely contain what we feel, with the faith that whatever comes up is workable and even necessary – this is what any healthy, mature human being needs to do and what we so often fail to do.

Norman Fischer, Taking Our Places

Staying open on this day

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Often the busyness of our lives can lead us to forget the inner vision or the real reason why we set out on our journey in the first place. We can lose our sense of creativity and joy as we constantly react to the shape which our days impose upon us. Staying open to this space –  to our vision for our lives, to a deeper place of meaning, to nourishing the inner places of joy –  is a challenge as we face deadlines and the demands for success. How do we keep in touch with our true inheritance today?

In that first hardly noticed
moment to which you wake,
coming back to this life
from the other more secret,
moveable and frighteningly
honest world where everything began,
there is a small opening
into the new day
which closes the moment
you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light of the morning
window toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you to your
one love?  What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow and spread
its branches against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open and lovely
white page on the waiting desk?

David Whyte, What to remember when Waking

Where we grow

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

We never grow by dreaming about a future wonderful state or by remembering past feats. We grow by being where we are and experiencing what our life is right now. We must experience our anger, our sorrow, our failure, our apprehension; they can all be our teachers., when we do not separate ourselves from them. When we escape from what is given, we cannot learn, we cannot grow. That’s not hard to understand, just hard to do. Those who persist, however, will be those who grow in compassion and understanding. How long is such practice required? Forever.

Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

Seeing with fresh eyes

Karl Duffy1 Comment

As Mary Oliver reminded us yesterday, how we look and  pay attention is crucial in our work in counterbalancing the mind’s tendency to focus on the negative. So our day-to-day practice is to notice with fresh eyes, and not allowing our beliefs about what we “know” get in the way of the richness of moment-to-moment experience. We can try this today with the people we meet and when we are in familiar situations.

No moment is the same as any other. Each is unique and contains unique possibilities. Beginner’s mind reminds us of this simple truth. The next time you see somebody who is familiar to you, ask yourself if you are seeing this person with fresh eyes, as he or she really is, or if you are seeing only the reflection of your own thoughts about this person.

Jon Kabat Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living

Noticing colour in grey days

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Some similar thoughts, this time from a poet and not a neuroscientist. She encourages us to notice the little moments of colour that come into every day as a way of going against the heart’s tendency to close in on itself:

Red bird came all winter firing up the landscape as nothing else could.
Of course I love the sparrows, those dun-colored darlings so hungry and so many.
I am a God-fearing feeder of birds.
I know He has many children,
not all of them bold in spirit.
Still, for whatever reason —
perhaps because the winter is so long
and the sky so black-blue,
or perhaps because the heart narrows
as often as it opens —
I am glad
that red bird comes all winter
firing up the landscape
as nothing else could.

Mary Oliver, Red Bird