Tag: wellbeing

No way to get guaranteees

Karl Duffy6 Comments

We all know the top hit of the ego’s silent soundtrack — “If I do this I’ll feel better.” Seeing through our own particular version of this is part of the process of waking up. Again, the essence of this entitlement is the assumption that we can make ourselves, and life, be the way we want them to be. But this can only bring disappointment. Why? Because no matter what we do, there’s no way that we can guarantee a life that is free of problems.

Perhaps the most basic belief underlying all of our feelings of entitlement, our “if onlies,” and even our illusions, is the belief that life should please us, that life should be comfort-able. All of our resistance to life is rooted in our wanting life to be pleasing, comfortable, and safe. When life doesn’t give us what we want—the job that isn’t satisfying, the relationship that isn’t quite working, the body that ages or breaks down— we resist. Our resistance can manifest as anger, or fear, or self-pity, or depression, but whatever form it takes, it blocks our ability to experience true contentment. We see our discom­fort as the problem: yet it’s the belief that we can’t be happy if we’re uncomfortable that is much more of a problem than the discomfort itself. One of the most freeing discoveries of an awareness practice is when we realize firsthand that we can, in fact, experience equanimity even in the midst of discomfort.

Ezra Bayda, Beyond Happiness

Forget climbing

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A woman said to Suzuki Roshi that she found it difficult to mix practice with the demands of being a householder. “I feel that I am trying to climb a ladder, but for every step upwards I slip back two steps” “Forget the ladder” Suzuki Roshi told her. “When you are awake everything is right here on the ground” He explained how the desire to gain anything means you miss the reality of the present. “When you realize the truth that everything changes, and find your composure in it, there you find yourself…” The goal is to let go of anything special and meet each moment with beginners mind.

Jack Kornfield, “Enlightenment” in Inquiring Mind

Sunday Quote: Nowhere to go, nothing to achieve

Karl Duffy1 Comment

If you cannot find the truth right where you are,

where else do you expect to find it?

Dogen

The not knowing which is somehow right

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Most western therapies are based on theories of personality; they are geared toward knowing, rather than not-knowing. An unspoken assumption in the therapeutic world is that we should always know who we are, and if we don’t that a real problem. So when an old maladaptive identity starts to break down, this may be frightening for client and therapist alike…. At times like this I rely on my own realization that none of us really knows who we are, that this is the nature of our being, that if we have a true self at all, it somehow lies in the heart of the unknowingness that opens up when we inquire deeply into our existence, and that we can hang out on the edge of this unknown, we may discover how to let ourselves be, without having to be something.

John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening

An underlying calm

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Meditation is not about trying to create something special, to get to a special state; meditation is more about uncovering what has always been and always is here. One is simply trying to bring external conditions into alignment with that fundamental reality of human nature.

Ajahn Amaro, Finding the Missing Peace

It becomes clear slowly

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I don’t know who God is exactly.
But I’ll tell you this.
I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a water splashed stone
and all afternoon I listened to the voices of the river talking….

And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me what they were saying.
Said the river I am part of holiness.
And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered the moss beneath the water.

I’d been to the river before, a few times.
Don’t blame the river that nothing happened quickly.
You don’t hear such voices in an hour or a day.
You don’t hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.
And it’s difficult to hear anything anyway, through
all the traffic, the ambition.

Mary Oliver, At the River Clarion