The purpose of life is to be defeated by ever greater things.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame.
I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.
Rabbi Joshua Herschel
Month: January 2020
Sunday quote: Open to all
Experience life in all possible ways – good, bad, bitter-sweet, dark, light, summer, winter. Experience all the dualities. Don’t be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become.
Osho
Aligning with the truth
Rilke urges us: “want the change. Be inspired by the flame where everything shines as it disappears”
Exquisite image! Why does he exhort us to want the change? Because change is the way it is. We harbor notions of what is good for us and what is not, and try to organize and strategize accordingly. Yet life does what it does without our concern for our preferences, so Rilke is urging us to look beyond the parade of circumstances and events to the fundamental fact of change itself. In wanting the change, we are aligning ourselves with truth, with what is already happening.
Roger Housden, Dropping the Struggle: Seven ways to love the life you have
The sound of the eternal
The images which arise out of the depths, be they the burning bush of biblical imagery, the complaint of the body, or the dream we dream tonight, link us to that throbbing, insistent hum which is the sound of the eternal. As children we listened to the sound of the sea still echoing in the shell we picked up by the shore. That ancestral roar links us to the great sea which surges within us as well.
James Hollis, The Archetypal Imagination
A whisper
Some wisdom for our first full week of work, with its pressures and pulls
The pressure and pull of a noisy day denies us the comfort of God. It is a day in which we are buffeted by the world around us and left at the mercy of the clatter and jangle of our own hearts. To be a contemplative we must put down the cacophony of the world around us and go inside ourselves to wait for the God who is a whisper not a storm.
Joan Chittister, One House
Healing the heart
If the purpose of life is to ‘feel the rapture of being alive,’ and if our capacity to feel is crippled by old wounds and a lack of emotional education, then it follows that an important part of the spiritual path is to heal the heart and to become emotionally intelligent. As we work on opening the heart, we will confront, over and over, our fearful habit of closing to pain. The price for staying heart blind is a life unlived. The Dalai Lama has gone as far as saying that ‘the tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness.’ Heartfulness work is the cessation of avoidance. Jung said, ‘What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate,’ and nowhere is this more true than in the realm of the heart
Elizabeth Lesser
Mindfulbalance 