True restfulness is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough.
Ron Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern
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.
Our Inner world
Do not despise your inner world. Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status.
But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals.
What is the remedy…? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings.
Martha Nussbaum., American Philosopher, Lecturer in Ethics and Law, born 1947
Home
Belonging is related to longing. If you hyphenate belonging, it yields a lovely axiom for spiritual growth: Be – Your – Longing. Longing is a precious instinct in the soul. Where you belong should always be worthy of your dignity. You should belong first in your own interiority. If you belong there, and if you are in rhythm with yourself and connected to that deep, unique source within, then you will never be vulnerable when your outside belonging is qualified, relativized, or taken away. You will still be able to stand on your own ground, the ground of your soul, where you are not a tenant, where you are at home.
John O’Donohue, Anamchara
photo bart whelan
Not avoiding
To see myself and my life as they truly are is joy.
After all the struggle and avoiding and denying and going the other way,
it is deeply satisfying for a second to be there with life as it is.
The satisfaction is the very core of ourselves.
Who we are is beyond words –
just that open power of life, manifesting constantly in all sorts of interesting things,
even in our own misery and struggles.
The hassle is both horrendous and wholesome.
Charlotte Joko Beck.
The wrens nest
Wrens
make their nests of fancy threads
and string ends, animals
abandon all their money each year.
What is it that men and women leave?
Harder than wren’s doing, they have
to abandon their longing for the perfect.
The inner nest not made by instinct
will never be quite round,
and each has to enter the nest
made by the other imperfect bird.
Robert Bly, from Eating the Honey of Words
photo sylvain haye
Dissolving fear
We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if we could only arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
hoto raul654
