Tag: Stress Reduction

Endless opportunities

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid.

You’re able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias and aggression. 

You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die. And you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.

Pema Chodron

Time rushing by

Karl Duffy1 Comment
File:Border collie running down the beach at low tide.jpg
A leap year, so we “gain” an extra day, some extra time.  How will we use it?
Why has time disappeared in our culture? How is it that after decades of inventions and new technologies devoted to saving time and labor, the result is that there is no time left?
We are a time-poor society; we are temporally impoverished. And there is no issue, no aspect of human life, that exceeds this in importance.
The destruction of time is literally the destruction of life.
Jacob Needleman, American philosopher, born 1934
photo kyknoord

Swings

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Girl on swing.JPG

Don’t define your essential self in terms of a feeling. Don’t say, “I am depressed.” If you want to say, “It is depressed,” that’s all right. If you want to say depression is there, that’s fine; if you want to say gloominess is there, that’s fine. But not: I am gloomy. You’re defining yourself in terms of the feeling. That’s your illusion; that’s your mistake. There is a depression there right now, there are hurt feelings there right now, but let it be, leave it alone. It will pass. Everything passes, everything. Your depressions and your thrills have nothing to do with happiness. Those are just the swings of the pendulum

Anthony de Mello sj

photo clementina

The path

Karl Duffy7 Comments

File:Coast path at Higher Sharpnose Point - geograph.org.uk - 1570182.jpg

We can learn to recognize that the difficulty is our path instead of trying to escape from it. This is a radical yet necessary change in our perspective. When uncomfortable things happen to us, we rarely want to have anything to do with them. We might respond with the belief ‘Things shouldn’t be this way’ or ‘Life shouldn’t be so messy.’ Who says? Who says that life shouldn’t be a mess? When life is not fitting our expectations of how it’s supposed to be, we usually try to change it to fit our expectations. But the key to practice is not to try to change our life but to change our relationship to our expectations — to learn to see whatever is happening as our path.

Ezra Bayda, Being Zen

photo philip halling

Everything today

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Croissant y cortado - Mover el Bigote.jpg

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world revolves –

slowly, evenly,

without rushing toward the future

Thich Nhat Hanh

photo mover el bigote

Beyond the story

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

File:Stillness (24389492169).jpg

In meditation one tries to calm the body and the senses, to calm the mind, and become what’s called “the silent witness,” the witness beyond the mind. We in the West think that the mind is everything, but all Eastern practice is to get beyond the mind to the point of the silent witness, where you’re witnessing yourself, where you’ve gone beyond the ego, beyond the self.

The Indian tradition rests on what the West has largely lost: that there are three levels. There is the level of the body and the level of the mind, which the Western world thinks is the end. But beyond the body is the spirit. And that is the goal of life, to get to that.

Bede Griffiths

photo uros novina