Month: July 2024

Sunday Quote: beauty

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It is in your own power to maintain the beauty of your soul

Marcus Aurelius

Thresholds in life

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If you go back to the etymology of the word “threshold”, it comes from “threshing” which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into a more crucial and challenging and worthy fullness. There are huge thresholds in every life.

You know that, for example, if you are in the middle of life on a busy evening…..and you get a phone call that someone you love is suddenly dying, it takes just ten seconds to communicate that information. But when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world. Suddenly everything that seemed so important before is all gone, and now you are thinking of this.

So the given world that we think is there and the solid ground we are on is so tentative. And the threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and very often how we cross is the key thing

John O Donohue, quoted in the beautiful book, Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

A lot of heart

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In each of us, there’s a lot of softness, a lot of heart. Touching that soft spot has to be the starting place. This is what compassion is all about. When we stop blaming long enough to give ourselves an open space in which to feel our soft spot, it’s as if we’re reaching down to touch a large wound that lies right underneath all that protective shell that blaming builds.

Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Let go

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Give up to grace.

The ocean takes care of each wave until it gets to shore.

Rumi, Bismillah

Things arise and pass away

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A student once asked the spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti what his secret to peace and contentment was. He leaned over and whispered to the student “I don’t mind what happens”

Toni Bernhard, Self-Care in an Uncertain World

our natural state

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We all feel that health is the natural state of the body.

Why do we not feel that happiness is the natural state of he mind?

Rupert Spira, You are the Happiness you Seek