Karina Duffy
A human being who seeks dignity, joy, and beauty in daily life
Hi. My name is Karina & I am 23. I rush sometimes. I may be too idealistic. But, I'm learning.
At my core, I desire to experience the fullness of life with inner peace. I am doing my best at living in a way that reminds others that life is beautiful and contains immense meaning. I believe we all need grace and tenderness.
I trust deeply in a loving God, I enjoy conversing about neuroscience, & I have an affection for the color orange.
I am privileged to have partaken in different creative adventures, so I created this space to have them all exist on one site. Included are videos, podcasts, and writings I have been apart of or have published. I also want to include some of my favorite books, videos, quotes, podcast episodes, and prayers. I truly love my life & want to share the wisdom and goodness I have received and experienced.
I hope you find something helpful.
These are all published works I authored myself or in collaboration with others.
click on each to buy or learn more about them
Published
ARRIVING Podcast
Two of my best friends and I launched a podcast where we explore questions of our heart and tap into our collective and inner wisdom. We understand that we will never arrive to the fullness of knowing the answers, but it is in the arriving that makes it worthwhile.
BOOKS
these are all books that have been formative for my understanding of life, myself, community, and relationship with God
click on each book to buy or learn more about it
click on each to watch
videos
these are videos that I have spoken in
BuildinG Community
We are made in and for community. Life is made to be shared. As a society, we have grown far away from spending intentional time with one another. It doesn't always have to be deep or emotional for it to be meaningful time with another person. These are some of my favorite ways to spend time with others.
Idea:
Beauty nights
Beauty is healing. Pope John Paul II said, "Beauty is a source of strength for [hu]man."
Inspired by a friend hosting beauty nights in her basement, I created my own version of beauty nights where everyone brought one thing they found beautiful and shared it with the group. It could be a piece of art, music, poetry, a story, an experience of the week, an interest, or really anything someone finds to be beautiful to share. I can't put into words how life-giving it is to receive the beauty someone else has experienced.
How to beauty night:
- Ask people at least a week in advance to think about what they would want to bring to beauty night
- Set up a peaceful space where you can gather (maybe have snacks!!)
- When gathering, start off with a mindfulness or grounding prayer, intention, or exercise
- Open up the space for whoever to wants to start to share
- Stay present:)
Idea:
watch the clouds
Idea:
host people for dinner & cook together
Idea:
go for a walk
Idea:
coffee or tea chats
Idea:
explore a guided question or topic
Idea:
dance party
Idea:
sit in silence together for an hour
Idea:
sunset chasing
Idea:
choose to read and discuss the same book
Idea:
sunrise watch, coffee, and morning prayer
Idea:
find a local concert
Beloved podcast episodes + audiobook
These are just a few of my absolute favorite podcast episodes & my favorite audiobook. They will continue to shape my perspective on the world, work, & faith.
click on each to listen
click on each to watch or read
Miscellaneous Favorites
This is one of my favorite interviews & it serves as one of the main inspirations for my journal "Creating Joy."
My brilliant friend Kiera's Blog "A Penny for my Thoughts" is a place to spend much time on.
This is a reflection written by Fr. Fr. Luigi Giussani, the founder of the Catholic movement Communion and Liberation. It is on Chopin's Prelude, Op. 28, No. 15. Both the piece and reflection are quite powerful.
One of the most remarkable pieces written.
Kiera shared this video & the message has really stuck with me. It is an powerful articulation of the creative experience.
This is a reflection on the power of vacation that is a provocative way to understand what 'free time' is.
click on each to image to download or visit the site
BRain Care
Brain Care Tips:
Learn about childhood adversity & how it affects the brain:
Motivation as to why 'showing up' for yourself and others matters:
Learn about my work:
Prints for download
These are all prayer prints I made. Feel free to download them for your own personal use.
Keep scrolling down:)
Quote board
If you know me, you know I love a good quote.
Here are just a few that have moved me.
faith
faith cont'd
life
life cont'd
For God is not a God of confusion but of peace - 1 Cor. 14:33
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"Live in harmony with one another. Do not live haughty, but live with the lowly." - Romans 12:16
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"We also need to experience in prayer God's presence within us and to listen inwardly to the Holy Spirit so as to follow his suggestions." - Jacques Philippe
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"This goodwill, this habitual determination to always say 'yes' to God, in the great things as in the small, is a sine qua non [an essential condition] for inner peace" - Unknown
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"Every Christian must be a living book in which others can read the teaching of the Gospel" - St. Joseph of Leonissa
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"As Christians we are 'witnesses to that normally impossible unity that becomes experience and makes us capable of forbearance, of patience and mercy towards others, of total sharing, magnanimity in every circumstance.'" - Unknown
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"Christians live therefore without being scandalized by their own mistakes, or by betrayal –the most painful drawback of incoherence– but continuously recovering the horizon of the ideal" - Fr. Luigi Giussani
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"An authentic search for God leads to life with other people" - Unknown
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"'Fiat' a breath: it is the breath of freedom, and freedom is the capacity to adhere to Being, to Mystery, to Being that reveals itself through the Mystery" - Fr. Luigi Giussani
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"Faith is the unity of life." - Unknown
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"It is out of darkness that God creates." - Unknown
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"God cannot be found by weighing the present against the future or the past, but only by sinking into the heart of the present as it is." - Thomas Merton
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"Because they do not have the courage to be of the world, they believe they are of God. Because they do not have the courage to belong to one of the parties of humanity, they believe they belong to the party of God. Because they love no one, they believe they love God" - Peguy
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"Ideally a human being who fulfills his true capacity, his nature - with all of his will for life, his affection for the real - ought to be at the mercy of, hanging on, moment by moment, to this unreachable, indecipherable, ineffable, absolute unknown." - Fr. Luigi Giussani
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"We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achieved something of the fullness of being for which we were destined in our creation. If we love everything else but God, we contradict the image born in our very essence, and we cannot help being unhappy, because we are living a caricature of what we are meant to be." - Thomas Merton
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"Christ continues to bring man to perfection in
Himself. Under the signs of matter, what the sign indicates really happens—Christ becomes one with me.” - Fr. Luigi Giussani
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"Life is not accomplishing some special work but attaining to a degree of consciousness and inner freedom which is beyond all works and attainments." - Thomas Merton
"'Worship’ itself, Eucharistic communion, includes the reality both of being loved and of loving others in turn. A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented." - Pope Benedict XVI
"God you make things happen for no other reason than love."
"'Never betray a friend.
Never betray beauty.
Never betray the sword. By that he had meant being brave when he was afraid." - Sheldon Vanauken
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"'Our greatest injury is one we inflict upon ourselves. I find life beautiful, and I feel free. The sky within me is as wide as the stretching above my head. I believe in God and I believe in man, and I say so without embarrassment. Life hard, but that is no bad thing... True peace will come only when every individual finds peace within himself." - Etty Hillesum
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It takes enormous trust and courage to allow yourself to remember" - Bessel Van der Kolk
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"'Love not only begets love, it transmits strength" - Sheldon Vanauken
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"It takes beauty to wake us up." - Unknown
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"That is your disease: you want to capture life in formulas of your own. You want to embrace all aspects of life with your intellect instead of allowing yourself to be embraced by life. You want to create the world all over again each time, instead of enjoying it as it is." - Etty Hillesum
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"We are all of our history all at once" - Beth
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"Slowly but surely I have been soaking Rilke up these last few months: the man, his work, and his life. And that is probably the only right way with literature, with study, with people, or with anything else: to let it all soak in, to let it mature slowly inside you until it has become a part of yourself. That, too, is a growing process. Everything is a growing process. And in between, emotions and sensations may strike you like lightning. But still the most important thing is the organic process of growing." - Etty Hillesum
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"We all have a decision every morning, one way or the other: to die like dogs or to live according to the measure of eternity. Only an experience of life can defy the nothingness that infiltrates our days, and our temptation to surrender to that nothingness" - Fr. Julián Carrón
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"We follow that which changes us." - Giorgio
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"The soul grows by the measure of love it pours out." - Victor Frankl
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"Be careful of what you admire, because sometimes you may become it" - Emerson
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"The truer it is that he has every virtue and the happier he is, the more pain he will feel at the prospect of death. For this sort of person, more than anyone, finds it worthwhile to be alive." - Aristotle
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"Sometimes we just have to let things go so that new things are able to grow."
"Don't make ripples all around you, don't try so hard to be interesting, keep your distance, be honest, fight the desire to be thought fascinating by the outside world. Instead, reach for true simplicity in your inner life and in your surroundings, and also work." - Etty Hillesum
"Nothing about us except our neediness is, in this life, permanent" - C.S. Lewis
"Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self." - Victor Frankl
gratitude
"At night, too when I lie in my bed and rest in You, oh God, tears of gratitude run down my face, and that is my prayer. I have been terribly tired for several days, but that too will pass. Things come and go in a deeper rhythm, and people must be taught to listen; it is the most important thing we have to learn in this life." - Etty Hillesum
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"Mysticism is felt gratitude for everything" - Anthony De Mello
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"A vacation should make you love your life" - Velshonna
discernment
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"The key to discernment is not technique but the focused intensity of our desires. It is a matter of attitude and of relationships - the quality of how we relate to our own self, to other people, to created reality, to God." - Unknown
“Unfortunately, many people view the will of God as rather like a ten ton elephant hanging overhead, ready to fall on them. Actually, the word which we translate into English as 'will' comes from both a Hebrew and a Greek word which means 'yearning.' It is that yearning that lovers have for each other. Not a yearning of the mind alone or of the heart alone, but of the whole being. Yearning which we feel is only a glimmering at the depth of the yearning of God for us. Thus, the will of God is dynamic, personal love urging us on the path that leads to union with God. As with an ordinary journey, there may be several paths that lead to our destination equally well or some way maybe best, or some way may lead us away from our destination. 'So the prayer to know God’s will,' states theologian John Wright, 'is the prayer to have this kind of insight of the choices open to me.' When we pray 'thy will be done,' we are not thinking about a script of our lives that God has destined from all eternity. Rather, we are referring to the choices we must make. When these lead to union with God, they are compatible with God’s plan to unite all creation."
- Noreen Cannon and Wilkie Au, The Discerning Heart: Exploring the Christian Path
community
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“The concept of health is rooted in the concept of wholeness. To be healthy is to be whole… To try to heal the body alone is to collaborate in the destruction of the body. Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation” - Wendell Berry
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"Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives" - Bessel Van der Kolk
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"Every relationship should be peaceful, life-giving, and honest" - Daniela
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"When an encounter is all-embracing, it becomes the true shape of every relationship, the true form by which I look at nature, at myself, at others, and at things." - Fr. Julián Carrón
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"The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander acquaintance or solitude." - Emerson
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"Human beings have their selves not only in themselves but also outside themselves: they live in those whom they love and in those who love them and to whom they are 'present.' Human beings are relational, and they possess their lives - themselves - only by way of relationship. I alone am not myself; but only in and with you am I myself. To be truly a human being means to be related in love, to be of and for." - Cardinal Ratzinger
"Our responsibility is for unity, to the point of valuing even the smallest good that is in the other" - Fr. Luigi Giussani
“To be really means to inter-be. Just as a flower relies on the sunshine, on the cloud, on the earth in order to be, so it is with all of us. None of us can be by ourselves alone.” - Thich Nhat Hanh
silence/attention
"Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive." - Jenny Odell
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"Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything" - Gordon Hempton
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"Simple awareness is the seed of responsibility." - Jenny Odell
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What I'll see depends on how I look, and for how long. It's a lot like breathing. Some kind of attention will always be present, but when we take hold of it, we have the ability to consciously direct, expand, and contract it." - Jenny Odell
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"Silence takes us outside ourselves" - Unknown
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"Without the capacity for evaluating, we cannot have any experience at all" - Unknown
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"All that is needed to create the silence that entreats, that begs, is a moment of awareness of our distraction and superficiality that becomes an instant of pain, confusion, and humiliation... We lack silence, listening, and desire when the claim that we already know what is needed dominates in us." - Mauro-Giuseppe Lepori
"Through meditation we can find the quiet that already exists in the space between our thoughts. Sometimes referred to as 'the gap.' This space between thoughts is pure consciousness, pure silence, and pure peace." - Unknown
"10 things I have learned being 21"
I wrote this on my 22nd birthday. My mentor, Velshonna, has always encouraged the belief that every age of life has wisdom. I wanted to honor and share the 10 lessons I learned during my 21st year of life.
1. Who you spend your time with shapes your values and priorities
2. It is possible to hold the good and the bad at the same time
3. Peace & freedom will inevitably flow from honesty
4. I need to read scripture regularly
5. Grief has so many different layers
6. I need spontaneity and space from work
7. New beginnings are possible and so beautiful
8. Following your heart doesn't make sense sometimes
9. The Lord is so merciful
10. When you know your gifts and use them, they radiate outward (sometimes unknowingly)
This is an essay of Birthday reflections from being 22
a parting message
This world is big and beautiful, while simultaneously being small and full of suffering.
Don't be afraid to experience it all.
Embrace the suffering.
Embrace the good.
Don't let guilt or shame motivate who you choose to show up as.
Allow it it to be kindness.
Keep your eyes open today and all the todays you will have.
Learn to live in courage and truth.
I pray you have the best experiences of honesty that remind you how important it is to live in honesty.
Call your loved ones.
Pray everyday.
Remember it's not as scary as you think.
Find concrete ways to cultivate friendship.
Give yourself a nice hug.
Contact me
Email:
karinaduffyy@gmail.com
Instagram:
@karinaduffyy