Tag: Life

Opening to the sacred in each moment

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Pause practice can transform each day of your life. It creates an open doorway to the sacredness of the place in which you find yourself. The vastness, stillness, and magic of the place will dawn upon you, if you let your mind relax and drop for just a few breaths the storyline you are working so hard to maintain. If you pause just long enough, you can reconnect with exactly where you are, with the immediacy of your experience.

When you are waking up in the morning and you aren’t even out of bed yet, even if you are running late, you could just look out and drop the storyline and take three conscious breaths. Just be where you are! When you are washing up, or making your coffee or tea, or brushing your teeth, just create a gap in your discursive mind. Take three conscious breaths. Just pause. Let it be a contrast to being all caught up. In any moment you could just listen. In any moment, you could put your full attention on the immediacy of your experience. When you are completely wound up about something and you pause, your natural intelligence clicks in and you have a sense of the right thing to do. This is part of the magic: our own natural intelligence is always there to inform us, as long as we allow a gap. As long as we are on automatic pilot, dictated to by our minds and our emotions, there is no intelligence. It is a rat race. So, what is the most important thing to do with each day? With each morning, each afternoon, each evening? It is to leave a gap.

Pema Chodron

All seasons are needed for growth

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Our inner life is complex and multifaceted, like a vast and varied landscape requiring diverse experiences to cultivate it. At times we are challenged to walk and run, at other times to stay and sit. Disappointment is as crucial to our inner life as reliability, the same way that cold is as necessary to the life of a lilac bush as is the sun….Beings like us could never stay in bloom in a tropical world of uninterrupted satisfactions. We need all seasons for a fully realized human experience. Only in a world with shadows can our inner life flourish. The challenge is a ruthless fealty to the seasons of life and change. This includes losses, abandonments and endings chosen or imposed…Disappointment may also be a grace, “the fastest chariot to enlightenment” as the Tibetan saying goes.

David Richo, How to be an Adult in Relationships.

Not waiting until everything is perfect

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It’s odd in a way, this business of Perfect Christmasses. The story of the first Christmas is the story of a series of completely unplanned, messy events – a surprise pregnancy, an unexpected journey that’s got to be made, a complete muddle over the hotel accommodation when you get there… Not exactly a perfect holiday.

But it tells us something really vital. We try to plan all this stuff and stay in charge, and too often (especially with advertisers singing in our ears the whole time) we think that unless we can cook the perfect dinner, plan the perfect wedding, organise the perfect Christmas, we somehow don’t really count or we can’t hold our heads up. But in the complete mess of the first Christmas, God says, ‘Don’t worry – I’m not going to wait until you’ve got everything sorted out perfectly before I get involved with you. I’m already there for you in the middle of it all, and if you just let yourself lean on me a bit instead of trying to make yourself and everything around you perfect by your own efforts, everyone will feel a little more of my love flowing’.

Archbishop of Canterbury, Pause for Thought, BBC Radio 2.

Caring for oneself today

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To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times.  Thomas Merton

Obviously Merton wasn’t speaking about pathologically self-destructive behavior. Instead he was drawing our attention to the shadow side of normative, even seemingly positive, culturally approved behavior. He was referring to how we do great violence to ourselves simply in the manner in which we go about arranging our lives…

Philip Moffitt, Violence against Self

Finding strength to face challenges

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In the last week before Christmas Day, the Christian Liturgy uses a series of ancient invocations, called the O Antiphons, which date from the fifth Century. These beautiful statements reflect deep longings in the human psyche  –  looking for wisdom, or the key, or the source – and in the liturgy are focused on the immanent coming of Christ. They reflect deep longings, comforting, calming and focusing these universal human needs. Today’s antiphon is addressed by the person who feels weak and overwhelmed, who looks for strength, and recalls the theme of God intervening in history, appearing to Moses and leading him out of slavery in Egypt. He then shows a way towards happiness in his law. The ancient metaphor of “an arm outstretched” is a way of talking about strength and protection.

Texts such as these work on a number of levels and can be applied easily to the inner longings of the human spirit. Each day, we too need to draw on many sources of strength, both internal and external. Sometimes we are faced with unfamiliar territory or challenges which daunt us at first sight. Or we may need to leave behind those places in our lives where we have been held captive. We can see the word “Egypt” as not just the ancient land where the Hebrews were slaves:  the Hebrew word Mitzraim means “a narrow place.” So “going out from Egypt” can mean going from a narrow place, a place where we are stuck, to a wider place, a place where we are free. So often we get trapped in “narrow places”, stuck in situations or in our limited views of our own capabilities. We default easily to a sense of ourselves as weak or defective. At times of change we need to keep our focus on words and ideas that give us strength, that link us to our natural goodness and fearless nature. The themes at this time of the year remind us to keep our eyes fixed in hope on the light that appears in the darkness, to see where we are trapped and to let go of what is dead in our lives.

O Adonai, and Leader of the house of Israel,
You appeared to Moses in the burning bush,
and gave him the Law on Sinai:
come and save us with an outstretched arm.

Staying where we are

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As I said in an earlier post this week, there are a number of themes that recur in all cultures around this time,  as the Winter Solstice approaches. One of them is patience –  waiting in hope for the dark days to pass and for the signs of new life and growth to reappear. So here, as on previous Sundays,  is a reflection on the rich meaning of the word patience, both as a practice of staying with what is happening in each moment, as well as a way of working with difficult times in our lives.

A waiting person is a patient person. The word “patience” means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there. Waiting, then, is not passive. It involves nurturing the moment, as a mother nurtures the child that is growing in her womb.

Henri Nouwen, Eternal Seasons: A Spiritual Journey through the Church’s Year