Category: Be fully present

Fully alive

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Most of life only lasts a moment. Then our life becomes a memory, a dream. We are only alive a millisecond at a time. This moment! Or as one teacher put it, holding his thumb and forefinger about a quarter-inch apart, “All of life is only just this much – just a moment in time.” When we open to this very instant in which awareness produces consciousness, we are fully alive. Completely present. Big-minded. To the degree we are present for “just this much”,  this living moment, we are alive.

Stephen and Ondrea Levine, Embracing the Beloved

Not to be perfect

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Remember that you’re not on this earth to be perfect.

We’re here to love well, to realize our unity and our connection.

Adyashanti

Expansive

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To me, this is what bearing witness is; just relaxing and settling down, and learning to be in, as Carl Jung would say “the time of your life”…

Life becomes alive only when we are expansive, and we can expand only when we learn to relax: into our seat, into our feet on the floor, into our breath and our belly. From this place of relaxation we can bear witness to anything.

Koshin Paley Ellison, Wholehearthed

Springiness

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We sometimes need to change our understanding of strength to include yielding and gentleness. Not fighting with the reality of wind and being able to bend and go back are realities we can learn from the natural world.

Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.

Bruce Lee

The tree is made strong and resilient by its grounded root system. These roots take nourishment from the ground and grow strong. Grounding also allows the tree to be resilient so that it can yield to the winds of change and not be uprooted. Springiness is the facility to ground and ‘unground’ in a rhythmical way. This buoyancy is a dynamic form of grounding.

Aggressiveness is the biological ability to be vigorous and energetic, especially when using instinct and force. In the immobility (traumatized) state, these assertive energies are inaccessible. The restoration of healthy aggression is an essential part in the recovery from trauma. 

Peter Levine, Walking the Tiger

Everything can wake up

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Happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Naomi Shihab Nye, So Much Happiness [extract]

Sunday Quote: Go deeper

Karl Duffy1 Comment

You have been walking the water’s edge, holding up your robes to keep them dry.

You must dive naked under, deeper, under a thousand times deeper.

Love flows down.

Rumi