We are fascinated by words –
but where we meet
is in the silence behind them
Ram Dass
photo renatt stowe
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.
Tiny gifts
Our life is not a problem to be solved, it is a gift to be opened. The color of the sky, the song of the bird, a word of kindness, a strain of music, the sun on our face, the companionship of friends, the taste of the sea air, the shape of clouds in summer, the reds of maples in fall — there are so many gifts in a single life. If we are preoccupied with what is missing and what is broken and wrong, we lose the miraculous harvest of all these tiny gifts, piled one upon the other, that accumulate without our acknowledging them.
Wayne Muller, How then Shall We live: Four Simple Questions that Reveal the Beauty and Meaning of Our Lives
The two dynamics
We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender. Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty.
John O Donohue
photo benson kua
Beneath
Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behaviour.
You are not your thoughts
You are beneath the thinker
You are the stillness beneath the mental noise.
You are the love and joy beneath the pain
Eckhart Tolle
Inwardness
What is happiness but growth in peace,
The timeless sense of time when furniture
Has stood a life’s span in a single place,
And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir
The shining leaves of present happiness?
No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,
But where people have lived in inwardness
The air is charged with blessing and does bless;
Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.
May Sarton, The Work of Happiness
Sunday Quote: No need for words
I like the silent church
before the service begins,
better than any preaching.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
photo jose luis filpo cabana
