Tag: wellbeing

Addicted to thinking

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Most of the time we are not aware of being alive. We are too busy living. Our daily dramas, plans and desires fill our minds: we are addicted storytellers (both waking and sleeping) constantly rehearsing scripts and scenarios that we wish to arise or that may arise. The more mental energy we give our stories, the faster they spin and the more intense the experience becomes. It is powerfully addictive and feeds on itself. It is the ultimate drug and like any drug, increasing amounts are needed to maintain the intensity. Should the intensity drop for any length of time, we believe that something has gone wrong…If we run out of fantasies to pursue, we say that life has become meaningless.

Simon Small, From the Bottom of the Pool

Things come toward us

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
And they come toward me, to meet and be met.

 

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

 

The quality of life is in proportion to the capacity for delight.

The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

May Sarton

 

Say today: “It’s like this”

Karl Duffy1 Comment

https://i0.wp.com/digitaljournal.com/img/9/1/2/2/9/7/i/5/5/5/p-medium/aheatwave.jpgMeditation’ can mean all kinds of things. But when I use this word, what I’m mainly using it for is that sense of centering, that sense of establishing, resting in the center. The only way that one can really do that is not to try and think about it and analyze it; you have to trust in just a simple act of attention, of awareness. It’s so simple and so direct that our complicated minds get very confused. “What’s he talking about?  I’ve never found a still point in me. When I sit and meditate, there’s nothing still about it.” But there’s an awareness of that. Even if you think you’ve never had a still point or you’re a confused, messed-up character that really can’t meditate, trust in the awareness of that very perception. […]

Awareness is your refuge: Awareness of the changingness of feelings, of attitudes, of moods, of material change and emotional change: Stay with that, because it’s a refuge that is indestructible. It’s not something that changes. It’s a refuge you can trust in. This refuge is not something that you create. It’s not a creation. It’s not an ideal. It’s very practical and very simple, but easily overlooked or not noticed. When you’re mindful, you’re beginning to notice, it’s like this.

Ajahn Sumedho, Intuitive Awareness

Keeping our attention on what is in front of us

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The lighthouse illuminates in a single beam of light. The monk rakes the sand in the garden in front of him. We try to keep our minds focused on the moment in hand, on the next breath in practice. We do not have to live the whole of the future now, just this moment, this breath.

Its vision sweeps its one path
like an aged monk raking a garden,
his question long ago answered or moved on.
Far off, night-grazing horses,
breath scented with oatgrass and fennel,
step through it, disappear, step through it, disappear

Jane Hirshfield, Lighthouse

Holding on to what was once real

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

What we are so afraid of losing are qualities that we have discovered and invested in the particular forms we are attached to. We have confused these qualities with the forms we have discovered them in.

Kabir Helminski, Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness and the Essential Self

Noticing the extraordinary in front of us

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Practice is about suspending those entrenched habits of mind that actually cut us off form the very weird fact of being here at all. We spend so much of our lives inhabiting a fictitious future or nostalgically indulging in memories and reminiscences that we fail to notice this extraordinary thing that is happening to us right now. It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in the morning and feel bored.

Stephen Bachelor, in an interview with Wes Nisker, Inquiring Mind