Tag: Mindfulness

All life is good

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Knowing that your life is short, to enjoy it day after day, moment after moment, is the life of ‘form is form, and emptiness is emptiness.’ The famous Chinese Zen master Ummon said ‘Sun-faced Buddha and Moon-faced Buddha.’ When he was ill, someone asked him. ‘How are you?’ And he answered, ‘Sun-faced Buddha and moon-faced Buddha.’ That is the life of ‘form is form and emptiness is emptiness.’ One year of life is good. One hundred years of life are good. If you continue our practice, you will attain this stage.

Shunryu Suzuki roshi, Zen mind Beginners Mind

[The Sun-face buddha supposedly lives for a really long time, at least hundreds of years. The Moon-face buddha lives just for one day and one night]

The best teachers

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.

Thomas Merton

Sunday Quote: Inside

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

You say God looks at us from above,

but he actually sees us from the inside

Rumi

Rest

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.

Walter Brueggemann, 1933 – American Old Testament scholar 

Apples

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Don’t go all the way to heaven. Reach for apples, not the clouds. Let them fluff through the sky, skimming passage, into the past.

You are your present, your own apple. Pick it from your tree. Raise it in your hand. It’s gleaming, rich with stars. Claim it. Take a luxurious bite out of the present, and whistle along the road of your destiny.

Pablo Neruda

The flood stopper

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Mindfulness, the ability to bear witness, is a tremendously powerful and skilful factor of mind. The Buddha called mindfulness the flood-stopper. It stops the floods of greed, hatred and delusion. With mindfulness we give ourselves a choice with regard to following what arises in the mind; keeping that choice available is something you want to go on doing because the mind almost longs to get trapped – and there are plenty of sights, sounds, flavours and ideas that can sweep you away, out of aware responsibility.

And, as we carry a body with us all the time, we can use that as a base for mindfulness; a place where we can stop the floods. We can turn our attention to the body and just refer to the body in the body, as it is – that is – sensations, energies and form, rather than the impressions of beauty or ugliness that information imposes on it. With these impressions the body is always the source of anxiety and agitation… The body is the home base.

Ajahn Sucitto, “What you take home with you” in Seeing the Way, An Anthology of Transcribed Talks and Essays by Monks and Nuns of the Theravada Forest Sangha Tradition