Tag: wellbeing

Appreciating the ordinary

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Day and night gifts keep pelting down on us. If we were aware of this, gratefulness would overwhelm us. But we go through life in a daze. A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is; a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep. How much we are missing in life by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them! But this can be changed. We need some methodical exercise in gratefulness. Years ago, I devised a method for myself which has proved quite helpful. Every night I note in a pocket calendar one thing for which I have never before been consciously thankful. Do you think it is difficult to find a new reason for gratitude each day? Not just one, but three and four and five pop into my mind, some evenings. It is hard to imagine how long I would have to live to exhaust the supply.

David Steindl-Rast, A Listening Heart: The Spirituality of Sacred Sensuousness 

Blue-collar daily practice

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Finding happiness through our work requires two basic things. First, we have to recognize our own patterns, such as trying ever harder to be appreciated or doing whatever it takes to get approval. These patterns block any chance of experiencing genuine happiness. And second, once we recognize those patterns, we have to undertake the basic, blue-collar work of practice — the mundane everyday efforts of bringing awareness to the underlying fears that dictate how we feel and act. There is nothing romantic or magical about our blue-collar efforts; they are bound to take time and perseverance, and we may become frustrated at times along the way. But we can remind ourselves regularly that awareness is what ultimately heals.

In addition to staying present with our experience, we can also turn our whole approach toward our work right-side up. We do this by turning away from our normal orientation of ‘What’s in it for me?’ and instead ask the question ‘What do I have to offer?’ When we learn to give from our own unique gifts, we can experience the deep fulfillment of living a life in which we prioritize giving over getting. We will also discover that giving from the generosity of the heart is one of the essential roots of true contentment.

Ezra Bayda, Beyond Happiness: The Zen Way to True Contentment

Walking in a distracted poverty

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Strolling in a large park one day I was startled by how many people were walking without looking up, or walking in a myopic daze while talking on their “cells,” as we say in shorthand, as if spoken words were paddling through the body from one saltwater lagoon to another.

As a species, we’ve somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we’ll survive our own ingenuity. At first glance, it seems as if we may be living in sensory overload. The new technology, for all its boons, also bedevils us with alluring distractors, cyberbullies, thought-nabbers, calm-frayers, and a spiky wad of miscellaneous news. Some days it feels like we’re drowning in a twittering bog of information.

But, at exactly the same time, we’re living in sensory poverty, learning about the world without experiencing it up close, right here, right now, in all its messy, majestic, riotous detail. The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature’s precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature…As an antidote I wish schools would teach the value of cultivating presence. As people complain more and more these days, attention spans are growing shorter, and we’ve begun living in attention blinks. More social than ever before, we’re spending less time alone with our thoughts, and even less relating to other animals and nature. Too often we’re missing in action, brain busy, working or playing indoors, while completely unaware of the world around us.

On the periodic table of the heart, somewhere between wonderon and unattainium, lies presence, which one doesn’t so much take as engage in, like a romance, and without which one can live just fine, but not thrive.

Diane Ackerman, Are We Living in Sensory Overload or Sensory Poverty?, New York Times, June 10, 2012

What gives us hope

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I think that each of us has something or someone that gives us hope. This “reason for hoping” may be a person or a special place, a religious belief or a vision of life that is strong enough to weather the internal storms and strife.

There is an Ethiopian legend about a shepherd  boy Alemayu that speaks to me of the power of hope. Alemayu had to spend the night on a bitterly cold mountain. He had only a very thin cloth to wear. To the amazement of all the villagers, he returned alive and well. When they asked him how he survived, he replied: ” ‘The night was bitter. When all the sky was dark, I thought I would die. Then far, far off I saw a shepherd’s fire on another mountain. I kept my eyes on the red glow in the distance, and I dreamed of being warm. And that is how I had the strength to survive.

Each one of us has a  “shepherd’s fire on another mountain” that has kept our hope alive.  This fire has given us the courage to recover our lost self and believe in the dreams that stir in our soul.

Joyce Rupp, Dear Heart, Come Home

Trusting, even if you feel lost today

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey.

John O’Donoghue, Anam Chara

…and where, in the deepest sense, that journey needs to go…

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I have been travelling and on holidays in the past few weeks. Outside travel and movement is a good time to observe ongoing inner movement. Even when relaxed, the ever-present restless  mind was working away, wanting that things fit into a pre-decided idea of how moments, such as those spent on holidays,  “should” be. Days should be relaxing, places should be better or give the exact same sense as before, the weather should consider me and be warmer or cooler, my mood calmer or more enthusiastic. This characteristic of the mind is described in one ancient text as giving rise to the  “shackles of constant becomings” – always moving, always wanting something else and seeking fulfilment.  Thus, as happens frequently, things were often seen as too much  – “It was too hot to do anything” – while others not enough – “There were too many people there and it was not quiet enough to allow me enjoy the place”.

The following, profound,  text describes both this problem and indicates the way towards its resolution, through a certain type of journey.  The end of our restless, wanting-more, wanting-other,  mind cannot be calmed by “travelling”, it tells us. The word “travelling” here seems to suggest, looking outside for solutions, such as ideas about our life or intellectual concepts, or in the latest technique – doing more,  fixing more, trying harder – all of which are rooted in the unending quest to get our life under control by figuring it out or getting something.  On the contrary, the radical solution proposed – that gets to the heart of our restlessness –  is to be found in a type of travel, but one that goes inside, getting to know the body and heart, in an experiential way. In becoming familiar with the sensations of the body and how they give rise to energies in the heart that leave us restless, and seeing these body and heart formations as passing through and not identifying with them, we take the  journey that leads to the end of our restless travel. The whole world is to be found there.

That end of the world wherein one is not born, does not grow old or die, pass away or reappear, that I declare, is impossible to be known, seen or reached by travelling. But, friend, I do not declare that one can make an end of suffering without reaching the end of the world. Friend, I do proclaim that in this very body, with its perceptions and consciousness, is the world, the world’s arising, the world’s cessation and the path leading to the world’s cessation.

The Buddha, Rohitassa Sutta.