Tag: Life

Trust in your experience

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

This is an exquisite truth:
Saints and ordinary folk are the same from the start.
Inquiring about a difference
is like asking to borrow string when you already have a good strong rope.

Every Dharma is known in the heart.

After rain, the mountain colors intensify.
Once you become familiar with the design of fate’s illusions
Your ink-well will contain all of life and death.

from the great Hsu Yun, 1840 – 1959, renowned Chan (Zen) Buddhist, regarded as the greatest Buddhist teacher in China in the modern era.

found in Grainger, The Longing In Between: Sacred Poetry From Around The World

Seize the present

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The well-known Carpe Diem text. The original Latin is meaning is closer to “harvest the day” which gives perhaps a deeper sense than the popular translation:

Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate,
Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers
In tea leaves or palms.

Be patient with whatever comes.
This could be our last winter, it could be many
More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:


Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines
And forget about hope. Time goes running, even
As we talk.

Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair.

Horace, 65 – 8 BC, Roman Lyric Poet, Ode I. 11 translation Burton Raffel, The Essential Horace: Odes, Epodes, Satires and Epistles, 

The subtle mysteries

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Always be joyful, no matter what you are. With happiness you can give a person life. Every day we must deliberately induce in ourselves a buoyant, exuberant attitude toward life. In this manner, we gradually become receptive to the subtle mysteries around us. And if no inspired moments come, we should act as though we have them anyway. If you have no enthusiasm, put up a front. Act enthusiastic, and the feeling will become genuine.
–

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslau 1772- 1810), Founder of the Breslov Hasidic movement.

Become love

Karl Duffy2 Comments

If you want to know God,
become love. If you want
to know others, become love.
If you want to know yourself,
become love. And if you want
to know love, forget all you
thought you knew or needed
to know, and become love.

Meister Eckhart, 1260 – c. 1328, German theologian, philosopher and mystic

A useful short practice

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The first technique I’d like to share – dropping – works to break the habit of being caught up in our thinking minds, lost in thought, and out of touch with our bodies. Dropping is not so much a mediation as a way to cut through the tension-building stream of constant thinking, worrying and speediness. It allows us to land in the present moment, in a grounded and embodied way.

In dropping you do three things at the same time: 1. Raise your arms and let your hands drop onto your thighs. 2 Exhale a loud, big breath. 3. Drop your awareness from thinking into what your body feels.

Just rest there being aware of your body without any special agenda. Feel your body with all its sensations, pleasant or unpleasant, warmth or coolness, pressure, tingling, pain, bliss, whatever comes into your awareness.

So in brief, drop, rest, and relax…let yourself relax from within. Give yourself permission to do nothing.

from the very nice book by Daniel Goleman and Tsonknyi Rinpoche, Why we Meditate: 7 Simple Practices for a Calmer Mind

Sunday Quote: Immersed

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Life is like music for its own sake.

We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.

Alan Watts