Tag: Mindfulness

A spacious awareness

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Lac Leman

Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance. If we are holding back from any part of our experience, if our heart shuts out any part of who we are and what we feel, we are fuelling the fears and feelings of separation that sustain the trance of unworthiness. Since non-acceptance is the very nature of the trance, we might wonder how, when we feel most stuck, we take the first step out of it. The very nature of our awareness is to know what is happening. Like a boundless sea, we have the capacity to embrace the waves of life as they move through us. Even when the sea is stirred up by the winds of self-doubt, we can find our way home. We can discover in the midst of the waves, our spacious and wakeful awareness.

Tara Brach

With thanks to Ellen van Kalmthout for sending me the beautiful photo of Lac Leman for use on the blog.

Both-and

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apples and oranges

So many of our troubles, personal and political, come from “either-or” thinking. For example, when I’m talking with a person who holds religious or political beliefs that differ from my own, either-or thinking can create a combative situation: “I’m right, so he/she is wrong. Therefore, my job is to win this argument by any means possible.” But ”both-and” thinking can lead to something much more creative: “Maybe I don’t have everything right, and maybe he/she doesn’t have everything wrong. Maybe both of us see part of the truth. If I speak and listen in that spirit, we both might learn something that will expand our understanding.”

Think of how much more civil and creative our conversations across lines of difference would be if we thought that way more often! We’d be working to create a container to hold our differences hospitably instead of trying to win an argument.

Of course, like everything human, this issue begins inside of us, in how we hold our own internal paradoxes. If we can’t hold our inner complexities as both-and instead of either-or, we can’t possibly extend that kind of hospitality to another person. Here’s an ancient truth about being human: we cannot give gifts to others that we are unable to give to ourselves! That’s why “inner work” done well is never selfish. Ultimately, it will benefit other people.

Parker Palmer, Holding Paradox

Dont Know Mind II

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Blue mountains and forest.jpg

Who makes these changes?

I shoot and arrow right, it lands left

I ride after a deer and find myself

chased by a boar.

I plot to get what I want

and end up in prison.

I dig pits to trap others

and fall in myself.

I should be suspicious

of what I want.

Rumi

Dont know Mind I

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https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Great_Egret_%28Ardea_alba%29_chicks_with_parent_in_nest%2C_Morro_Bay_H_%282594536724%29.jpg

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.

To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.

Pema Chodron

photo mike baird

The secret ingredient of happiness

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File:Zahncremes.jpg

The most prophetic thing Thomas Merton ever did was to say to a Louisville shopkeeper who asked him what brand of toothpaste he preferred, “I don’t care”. Merton was intrigued and troubled by the store clerk’s response. “He almost dropped dead” he wrote,  “I was supposed to feel strongly about Colgate or Pepsodent or something with five colours. And they all have a secret ingredient. But I didn’t care about the secret ingredient ….the worst thing you can do now is not care about these things”

This not-caring attitude is important to hold onto these days and still prophetic, because the ultimate goal of the marketer is to have us see consumer products not as mere things, but as keys to our identity.  Brands are marks that owners out on their property, often by painful means, and we are in perilous territory when our self-image, and even our self-worth, is founded on which brands and labels we can afford to purchase and display.

Kathleen Norris, The Secret Ingredient

Starting over, new again

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Moonrise on Hobart Bay - NOAA.jpg

The soul, like the moon,
is now, and always new again.

And I have seen the ocean
continuously creating.

Since I scoured my mind
and my body, I too, Lalla,
am new, each moment new.

My teacher told me one thing,
live in the soul.

When that was so,
I began to go naked,
and dance.

Lalla, Kasmiri poet and mystic, 1320 – 1392

Original Kasmiri translated by Coleman Banks