Month: April 2025

an experience of stillness

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Just for today claim a window of time – even ten minutes is enough to begin – and rest into an experience of stillness.

Connect gently with your breath, breathing in the life-sustaining breath of the spirit, breathing out and releasing whatever distracts us from this moment.  As thoughts or anxieties arise, gently release them and return to this moment. The invitation is toward both an outer and inner silence.  Notice the way silence nourishes you and consider ways to give yourself this gift each day.

Christine Valters Paintner,  Benedictine oblate, spiritual director, and author, The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred

all forms of fear

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Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are caused by too much future, and not enough presence.

Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Loosen the grip

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Psychoanalysis, at its best, doesn’t give us answers but loosens the grip of the questions we’re obsessed with.

Sometimes the most liberating thing is to realize that we don’t need to know why we are the way we are –

we just need to live more freely with the uncertainty.

Adam Phillips, British psychoanalytic psychotherapist and essayist, Going Sane

Sunday Quote: seeds

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The earth has been broken open a thousand times to feed us.

What if our pain is also a seed?

Mark Nepo, Inside the Miracle

simplicity

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On the occasion of the funeral of Pope Francis, an example of leadership as service, of simplicity in the face of a world of excess and a worldview in contrast to what has taken centre stage these last few months and years.

The measure of the greatness of a society is found in the way it treats those most in need, those who have nothing apart from their poverty. … When we go out to the margins, to the suffering, we discover something new: the joy of service.

Pope Francis, Homily 2015, On Serving the poor

Simplicity does not mean poverty or austerity. It is the conscious choice to reduce the superfluous in order to focus on the essential – what truly matters in life.

The more we clutter our lives with distractions, the less space we have for genuine contentment. Happiness thrives in simplicity, in moments of quiet presence rather than in the relentless pursuit of more.

Matthieu Ricard Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill

everything changes

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The Buddha taught that everything is impermanent – flowers, tables, mountains, political regimes, bodies, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.

We cannot find anything that is permanent.

Impermanence is more than an idea.

It is a practice to help us touch reality.

Thich Nhat Hahn, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching