Month: January 2012

Estblishing patterns of rest

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The extent to which we are divorced from the complementary rhythms of restfulness and creativity is the extent to which we are cut off from patterns of well-being within ourselves and in our relationships. If we fail to establish regular practices of stillness and rest, our creativity will be either exhausted or shallow. Our countenance, instead of reflecting a vitality of fresh creative energy that is sustained by the restorative depths of stillness, will be listless or frenetic. This is true collectively as it is individually,and applies as much to human creativity as it does to the earth’s fruitfulness. Creativity without rest, and productivity without renewal, leads to  exhaustion of our inner resources.

J. Philip Newell, The Book of Creation

Sunday Quote: Taking time

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All this hurrying soon will be over. 

Only when we slow down do we touch the holy.

Rilke

The starting point for happiness

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Contemplating the goodness within ourselves is a classical meditation, done to bring light and joy to the mind. In contemporary times this practice might be considered rather embarrassing, because so often the emphasis is on all the unfortunate things we have done, all the disturbing mistakes we have made. Yet this classical reflection is not a way of increasing conceit. It is rather a commitment to our own happiness, seeing our happiness as the basis for intimacy with all of life. It fills us with joy and love for ourselves and a great deal of self-respect.

Significantly, when we do metta practice, we begin by directing metta toward ourselves. This is the essential foundation for being able to offer genuine love to others. When we truly love ourselves, we want to take care of others, because that is what is most enriching, or nourishing, for us. When we have a genuine inner life, we are intimate with ourselves and intimate with others. The insight into our inner world allows us to connect to everything around us, so that we can see quite clearly the oneness of all that lives. We see that all beings want to be happy, and that this impulse unites us. We can recognize the rightness and beauty of our common urge towards happiness, and realize intimacy in this shared urge.

Sharon Salzberg, Facets of Metta

Give yourself a break this weekend

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It’s important to acknowledge mistakes, feel appropriate remorse, and learn from them so they don’t happen again. But most people keep beating themselves up way past the point of usefulness: they’re unfairly self-critical. Inside the mind are many sub-personalities. For example, one part of me might set the alarm clock for 6 am to get up and exercise . . . and then when it goes off, another part of me could grumble: “Who set the darn clock?” More broadly, there is a kind of inner critic and inner protector inside each of us. For most people, that inner critic is continually yammering away, looking for something, anything, to find fault with. It magnifies small failings into big ones, punishes you over and over for things long past, ignores the larger context, and doesn’t credit you for your efforts to make amends.

Therefore, you really need your inner protector to stick up for you: to put your weaknesses and misdeeds in perspective, to highlight your many good qualities surrounding your lapses, to encourage you to keep getting back on the high road even if you’ve gone down the low one, and – frankly – to tell that inner critic to Shut Up.

Rick Hanson, The Art of Self-forgiveness

Tuning in to ourselves

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Perhaps the most common and pernicious form of non-listening is our non-listening to ourselves. So much of what we actually feel and think is unacceptable to us. We have been actually conditioned over a lifetime to simply not hear all our own self-pity, anger, desire, jealousy, wonder. Most of what we take to be our adult response is no more than our unconscious decision not to listen to what goes on inside us. And as with any human relationship, not listening to ourselves damages our self-respect. To allow ourselves to feel what we actually do feel – not to be afraid or dismayed but to open up a space inside our hearts large enough to safely contain what we feel, with the faith that whatever comes up is workable and even necessary – this is what any healthy, mature human being needs to do and what we so often fail to do.

Norman Fischer, Taking Our Places

Staying open on this day

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Often the busyness of our lives can lead us to forget the inner vision or the real reason why we set out on our journey in the first place. We can lose our sense of creativity and joy as we constantly react to the shape which our days impose upon us. Staying open to this space –  to our vision for our lives, to a deeper place of meaning, to nourishing the inner places of joy –  is a challenge as we face deadlines and the demands for success. How do we keep in touch with our true inheritance today?

In that first hardly noticed
moment to which you wake,
coming back to this life
from the other more secret,
moveable and frighteningly
honest world where everything began,
there is a small opening
into the new day
which closes the moment
you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light of the morning
window toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you to your
one love?  What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow and spread
its branches against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open and lovely
white page on the waiting desk?

David Whyte, What to remember when Waking