Tag: wellbeing

Three parts to our distress

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Our psychological distress is composed of at least three elements: the basic pain of feelings that seem overwhelming; the contracting of body and mind to avoid feeling this pain; and the stress of continually having to prop up and defend an identity based on this avoidance and denial. One of the main ways we try and hold our identity together is by developing an elaborate web of rationalizations – stories about the way we are or reality is – to justify our denial and avoidance.

John Welwood, Toward A Psychology of Awakening

Holding everything lightly

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We should always remember that meditation is the cultivation and practice of nonattachment….Mindfulness is nothing but the middle way. It is neither an intense practice, nor can it be done without effort. It must be done with balance. Properly done, it is neither detached pushing away nor egoistic clinging. Be very careful about sitting down with ideas like, “I am sitting, I am watching, I am breathing, I am meditating, I am this, that is mine”.

Buddhadasa Bhikku

Our words cannot fully contain reality

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Words stand between silence and silence:between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves,  because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

Thomas Merton

A way to restore balance

Karl Duffy1 Comment

To live well, we need to be able to see what’s happening, in us and around us. We also need to know how not to get impulsively drawn into unskillful, reactive patterns of behavior that don’t serve us or those around us well. Mindfulness offers us a way of paying attention to what’s actually going on, to know what’s happening at an experiential level. And that is something that we tend not to train ourselves in these days — instead our education system, our workplaces, our media, our governments, all tend to train us in creating and valuing concepts or products — we get stuck at a head level and a doing level, driven by thinking and activity. There’s nothing wrong with ideas or products, but there’s an imbalance in our culture whereby a more intuitive knowledge is ignored, or just not cultivated, and it is this kind of intuitive awareness that mindfulness practice can help us to unlock. So mindfulness could be a way for us to restore balance — to help us recalibrate in a way that enables us to connect with our deepest, most heartfelt values and to act in accordance with them more often. That in turn, could lead to us living happier, healthier lives in a happier, healthier world.

Ed Haliwell, author of The Mindfulness Manifesteto, Interview in Tricycle Magazine

Letting go of arbitrary goals

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

As long as our orientation is toward perfection or success, we will never learn about unconditional friendship with ourselves, nor will we find compassion. We will just continue to buy into our old mindsets of right and wrong, becoming more solid and closed to life. ….We practice letting go of our idea of a “goal” and letting go of our concept of “progress,” because right there, in that process of letting go, is where our hearts open and soften — over and over again.

Pema Chodron

Having and being enough, today

Karl Duffy4 Comments

We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mind-set of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don’t mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.

Lynne Twist, The Surprising Truth of Sufficiency