Tag: Mindfulness

Our tendency to blame

Karl Duffy7 Comments

File:Kopfsalat Setzlinge.JPG

When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change

Thich Nhat Hanh

A prayer to nature

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blossom tree 140413

Earth teach me stillness
    As the grasses are stilled with light.
Earth teach me acceptance and readiness
    As the leaves which die in the fall.
Earth teach me regeneration
    As the seed which rises in the spring.
Earth teach me to forget myself
    As melted snow forgets its life.
Earth teach me to remember kindness
    As dry fields weep with rain.

Prayer of the Ute people

Balance…. interior and exterior

Karl Duffy4 Comments

Light-shining

If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or deed can still. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and the only threshold of an inner world. This wholesomeness is holiness. To be holy is to be natural, to befriend worlds that come to balance in you.

John O’Donohue, AnamChara

Noticing the “buts”

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When the mind is coloured by a dualistic perspective, every experience – even moments of joy and happiness – is bounded by some sense of limitation. There is always a but lurking in the background. One kind of but is the but of difference: “Oh my birthday cake was wonderful but I would have liked chocolate cake instead of carrot cake”. Then there is the but of “better”: “I love my new house,  but my friend John’s place is bigger and has much better light”. And finally there is the but of fear: “I can’t stand my job, but in this market how will I ever find another one”…I’ve begun to recognize..that feelings of limitation, anxiety fear and so on are just so much neuronal gossip. They are in essence, habits. And habits can be unlearned.

Yongey Mingpur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living

The Uncomplicated moment

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cherry_blossom

Mindfulness, seeing clearly, means awakening to the happiness of the uncomplicated moment. We complicate moments. Hardly anything happens without the mind spinning it up into an elaborate production. It’s the elaboration that makes life more difficult than it needs to be.

Sylvia Boorstein

Sweeping out clutter

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path

But it’s not so simple, this sort of “quiet hour” : it has to be learnt. A lot of unimportant inner litter and bits and pieces have to be swept out first. Even a small head can be piled high inside with irrelevant distractions. True, there may be edifying emotions and thoughts, too, but the clutter is ever-present. So let this be the aim of the meditation: to turn ones innermost being into a vast empty plain, with none of that treacherous undergrowth to impede the view so that something of “God” can enter you, and something of “Love” too.

Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life