The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.
The …thing in the cave, that was so dreaded, has become the center.
Joseph Campbell.
photo EMeczKa
Author: Karl Duffy
This is a Mindfulness Practice Blog written in Laois, Ireland, containing reflections on meditation practice, psychological growth, spirituality and wellness which hopefully may encourage and benefit others as they reflect on their lives and seek to develop a more balanced, mindful and conscious approach to it.
The roots of compassion
Easter Saturday.. a day of waiting
When I stop running from what frightens me, and instead try to feel and understand it, I learn to deal with the world with greater kindness.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness
photo AMISOM Public Information
Falling is part of life
Everyone, from time to time, experiences a challenge which makes life seem less safe, when things seem to tighten around them – a new job, relationship difficulties, facing an illness or being let down. Under these pressures we may stumble and even fall:
If there be anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe,
I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me.
But this was shown:
that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.
Julian of Norwich
photo of memorial for Captain Scott South Pole, by Barneygumble
The modern temptation: Letting work define us
For Christians this evening begins three days of reflection, the most significant part of the yearly calendar.
Often people devote their primary attention to the facts of their lives, to their situation, to their work, to their status. Most of their energy goes into doing. Meister Echhart writes beautifully about this temptation. He says many people wonder where they should be and what they should do, when in fact they should be more concerned about how to be. The love side of your life is the place of greatest tenderness within you. In a culture preoccupied with fixities and definites and correspondingly impatient mystery, it is difficult to step out from the transparency of false light into the more candlelit world of the soul.
John O’Donohue
photo: echiner1
Self-forgiveness
There’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy.
Pema Chödrön
When we practice meditation, we practice a double movement: there is a movement of return to the breath, a movement of recollection of presence, of samadhi — and there is a movement of mindfulness, of allowing everything to be just as it is. Last Sunday, I realized that the movement of return can also be a movement of allowing, of self-forgiveness. All the prodigal sons and daughters of our thoughts and dreams and gnarly little complexes are welcome to come to the feast of this present moment.
Tracy Cochran, Be a Lighthouse
photo scem.info
Our only teacher
Each Moment
life as it is
the only teacher.
Zen Center of San Diego, Practice Principles
photo tobosha
