Tag: Mindfulness

Not being paralyzed

Karl Duffy4 Comments

Someone asked me, “Aren’t you worried about the state of the world?” I allowed myself to breathe and then I said, “What is most important is not to allow your anxiety about what happens in the world to fill your heart. If your heart is filled with anxiety, you will get sick, and you will not be able to help.” Yes, there is tremendous suffering all over the world, but knowing this need not paralyze us. If we practice mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindful sitting, and working in mindfulness, we can try our best to help.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Every moment is good

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Returning to our relationship with the present moment, is an attempt to arrive at a total grasp of the universe, and thus keep …anchored in the moving stream of life, which embraces known and unknown.

Any and every moment, from this viewpoint, is therefore good or right, the best for whoever it be, for on how one orients himself to the moment depends the failure or fruitfulness of it.

Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart

Sunday Quote: Island Refuge

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Make an island of yourself, make yourself your refuge; there is no other refuge.
Make truth your island, make truth your refuge; there is no other refuge.

The Buddha

A hint of paradise

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Here is an amazement – once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.

Mary Oliver, The West Wind

Empty Time

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Finding yourself doesn’t require that you fly to Tibet, join a convent, or build a meditation room.

Just consistently keep a minimal commitment to empty time. 

Martha Beck

Seeds of wakefulness

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Every time you’re willing to acknowledge your thoughts, let them go, and come back to the freshness of the present moment, you’re sowing seeds of wakefulness in your unconscious. After a while what comes up is a more wakeful, more open thought. You’re conditioning yourself toward openness rather than sleepiness. You might find yourself caught, but you can extricate yourself by how you use your mind, how you actually are willing to come back just to nowness, the immediacy of the moment. Every time you’re willing to do that, you’re sowing seeds for your own future, cultivating this innate fundamental wakefulness by aspiring to let go of the habitual way you proceed and to do something fresh.

Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness