Tag: relationships

Lessons learnt from a little kitten

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The lesson of spiritual life is not about gaining knowledge, but about how we love. Are we able to love what is given to us, love in the midst of all things, love ourselves and others?

Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

Our neighbours have a new little black kitten, who is just starting to explore her area.  “Minette” as she is called, comes bounding onto our terrasse, with no fear and pure playfulness. She trusts completely, plays easily and then runs away to scamper up the trees at the end of the garden, only to return two minutes later to start over again. She wanders into the house and out again to hide among the olive and geranium flower pots waiting to pounce. Everything is a wonder for her, a piece of string, a blade of grass.

It is so easy to be at ease with and love any creature when they are confident and without fear, when they approach without defenses.  We too were born that way, before our life’s experiences led us to develop caution and defenses.  What we try to do in our practice is to get in touch with the natural confidence and joy which is within us , and which is there before the spinning mind takes over. Meditation is simply learning to stay in that natural calm, moving away from the spinning stories by sitting with the here-and-now.

The last two days were lovely and sunny and I took more time for quiet practice, walking and reading. They were calm,  easy days. Today it rains, so walks outdoors are less an option, but the same calm remains, even with the noise of the heavy rain.  To help myself do this I am concentrating on having a view of this moment, as one that is not attached to any  outcome, just as the little kitten demonstrates. A sense of wonder in the newness of each experience, wonderful in itself, a whole world to discover. Jon Kabat Zinn reminds us that this moment is the only moment which we can be sure of. Whatever is happening in this moment is the best that is, with no need to seek for other outcomes. When I do not focus on an outcome,  I am in less danger of splitting into me and it, or me and them, making the world and my experience  dualistic, dependant on something outside me.

Normally when I am confused or frightened, it is a sign that I have moved from this moment into some story of them and me, good and bad, blame and feeling hurt. And in those moments I find it harder to trust and to love. Letting go of the storylines, however, means that I find it easier to respond to needs beyond my own. So they are all linked: touching into natural confidence leads to joy and joy leads to being able to love. As Jack Kornfields quote reminds us, for real wisdom to open, it has to rest in and demonstrate compassion.  It does not remove us from the fulness of life. Minette shows the way. She plays,  she trusts, she exists fully without always living in her self-centred mind. She is at ease. She loves.

Having more love than fear

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Fear-based decisions prevent us from accessing our deepest needs, values, and wishes. We are sometimes driven or stopped by fear because it feels too overwhelming for us. Fear may convince us that the worst will happen and that we will be unable to handle it. This is the powerlessness that makes fear so sinister.

Adult relating is in the capacity to commit ourselves without being immobilized by the fear of abandonment if someone pulls too far away, or by the fear of engulfment if someone gets too close. It will seem as if these fears result directly from the behavior of our adult partner, but these are phantom fears from childhood. What is hurting us is gone but still stimulates. We are reacting to the inner landscape of our own past, a landscape ravaged by archaic plunder that has never been acknowledged, restored, or forgiven.

Fearlessness does not consist in having less fear or no fear but having so much more love that we go beyond fear! Fear is the porcupine on the trail as we hike: interesting, but not stopping us and not to be eliminated, since it belongs to the ecology of the psychic path. We rally our power with the conviction that there is an alternative to what the frightened mind has construed and that we do have it within us to handle whatever comes our way.

David Richo

What is good about disappointment

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

I frequently say to people I work with that one of the key things is how we deal with disappointment. It is a necessary skill,  because it is a frequent and inevitable occurance in an imperfect world. Each one of us has our own way of working with the  discomfort coming from disappointments in our plans or in other people. These ways are often based on how well our parents helped us deal with early shocks and disappointments, or whether they tried to shield us from the ups and downs of reality. Sometimes a parent can think that the best way to raise their child is to shower them with protection and insulate them from moments when they or the world are less than perfectly loving. However, the child has to learn to live in the real world, and the real world isn’t perfect. In other words, it is right –  and leads to the development of a healthy psyche – that the child is gently disappointed and comes to understand that it is not always possible to have people around them who understand and respond perfectly to their every wish. Even from an early age we have to learn to share, take our turn in games, postpone our own gratification and  acknowledge that other people have needs, moods and different agendas.

Rather than a parent having to being perfect  all the time, English Psychotherapist Winnicott said that they just had to be “good enough”.  This means that the parent provides enough support –  or “holding”  – to support the child without going to the extremes of  stifling it or of abandoning it.  The skill of the “good-enough parent” is to give the child a sense of loosening when faced with new situations rather than the shock and subsequent fear of being ‘dropped’. This allows the child develop resources, maintain a sense of control and  stops them from feeling that the world is unsafe all the time.

If this happens successfully,  the challanges of life do not frighten because the child builds up interior resources. It means that relationships does not threaten because, paradoxically, a smothering early closeness can trigger fears of engulfment in later life. And it means that the adult has a healthier structure for dealing with disappointment because as a child he or she has learned that life and people can not be perfect all the time. Often our disappointments do not arise so much from what actually happened, but more from how we compare what happened to our expectations, our inner patterns or our fixed version of reality. Disappointment show us that life –  like the good enough parent –  is not always available to us in the fixed way we want or whenever we demand it, but is still good despite that.

For this reason disappointments are good teachers. They allow us to see that there is more to us than our conscious thoughts and desires. They reveal how we can be attached to a specific version of how things should be, or of what life owes us. This does not mean they are easy because trying to avoid what disappoints is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. However, we grow more quickly if we are open to working with disappointments rather than avoiding them. Rather than being negative, they can become positive moments of growth,  leading us away from the suffering which is based on our lack of understanding of the deep reality of change.

Our culture has evolved into one that is pleasure-based and ego-identified, and that emphasizes immediate gratification. It also began to define success as your ability to control outcomes. Today, we teach our children that if you are an effective person, you can control your life. You can get and do what you want. If you do, you win in life. This modern image portrays “winners” as people who have it all together. You are not supposed to have internal conflicts, stress, or anxiety—that means you are incompetent. …… But this perspective flattens life. It denies the possibility of finding a deeper meaning to your experience. If you measure your self-worth and effectiveness according to these superficial cultural standards, then each time you suffer you are forced to interpret suffering as humiliation. Why would you choose to acknowledge suffering if it only stands for failure?

Phillip Moffitt, How Suffering got a Bad Name