Tag: wellbeing

Not aiming

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The Second ArrowDon’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.

Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run — in the long-run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Experience without judgment

Karl Duffy4 Comments

Cat-observing

The more I practiced, and the more I read about the practice, I realized that meditation was not meant to purge our minds of negative emotions or thought patterns, but rather meant to help us experience them without judgment. We were to let go of our resistance to pain at the deepest level and understand that we suffer not because pain is bad, but because our mind labels it as bad.

Kenji, Looking Back: My First Year as a Meditation Practitioner

October dawns

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bberry
The Irish word for October is Deireadh Fomhair, which means the “last harvesting” of the fruits of what we have planted earlier in the year. There is a rich crop of black berries on the hedgerows after the long Summer and mild Autumn here in Ireland.  So a quote which I am fond of, and which resonates with some of the recent words on autumn, second half of life and integration:

There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control over its development and to make it available in large quantities. Success brings many rewards and often fame. Fruits however, come from weakness and vulnerability. And fruits are unique. A child is the fruit conceived in vulnerability, community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another’s wounds. Lets remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness.
Henri Nouwen

photo elin

Keep walking

Karl Duffy4 Comments

mist walk

Today is the birthday of  the 13th Century Persian Poet Rumi. So here is one of my favourite short quotations, which in its few lines contains as much as we need to know. 

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings. Move within,
But don’t move the way fear makes you move.

Not letting it become our whole world

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Experiencing the power of faith doesn’t mean we’ve annihilated fear or denied it or overcome it through strenuous effort. It means that when we think we’ve conquered fear only to be once again overcome by it, we can still go on. It means feeling our fear and still remaining in touch with our heart, so that the fear does not define our entire world

Sharon Salzberg, Faith

Hidden growth

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Bee Holme in autumn mist - geograph.org.uk - 761379.jpg

A lovely misty morning here in Kildare, and the leaves are clearly starting to fall.  Autumn is the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” as Keats said in his beautiful description.   The seeds fall underground and move into a period of silent growth. We can learn from them how to trust and wait,  in times which are dark or when nothing seems to be happening.

I gratefully acknowledge how darkness has become less of an enemy for me and more of a place of silent nurturance, where the slow, steady gestation needed for my soul’s growth can occur. Not only is light a welcomed part of my life, but I am also developing a greater understanding of how much I need to befriend my inner darkness.

Joyce Rupp, Little Pieces of Light

photo phil champion