Tag: wellbeing

Life as teacher

Karl Duffy6 Comments

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Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. If we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. It just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves.

Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

artwork: yuma

Inside, not out

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Finding a refuge to come home to

Each one of us has a place to live, be it Ireland, France, Switzerland or the USA. And each of us has a set of current circumstances with which to live. These are our “plots of land”. It is by working with things as they are that we are challenged to find contentment

As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found – in himself.

Erich Fromm

Trying to hold on

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File:Yawning German Shepherd.JPG 

Although this is as true as the sky is blue, we keep trying to make gain permanent in order to try to bring about happiness for “me.” We think, “If only So-and-So would love me, I would be happy,“ “If only things would change, I would be happy,” “If only things would stay the way they are, I would always be happy,” and it only leads to heartache. This kind of wanting involves a lot of hope and fear, all based on denial of a simple truth: all the pleasure the world can offer eventually turns to pain. Trying to hold onto pleasure only causes more pain.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Easy Come Easy Go

photo Lewis Collard

What we label today

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Label

The only reality we know is our concept of it.

Life is nothing till we call it something, and this is where mind training comes in.

Through it we learn to hold our concepts loosely, particularly those that allow unhelpful emotions to take over and cause us problems.

Karuna Cayton, The Misleading Mind

Learning to stay

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Still-WaterSilence is simply a state we reach when, like a fire deprived of fuel, distractions and restlessness naturally fade away. When a desert monk complained that he could not control his wayward thoughts, his teacher answered “Keep on sitting in your cell and your thoughts will come back from their wanderings“. In a way then there is nothing to achieve in prayer; we do not have to try to be quiet in order to be silent, we just have to be. Silence is a state of non-being that is being itself.

Nicholas Buxton, Tantalus and the Pelican

Short pauses….

Karl Duffy2 Comments

door_closing

Try pausing right before and right after undertaking a new action,

even something simple like putting a key in a lock to open a door.

Such pauses take a brief moment,

yet they have the effect of decompressing time and centering you.

David Stiendl Rast