Category: Make the most of life

Our restless heart

Karl Duffy1 Comment

tree

I love you, gentlest of Ways,
who ripened us as we wrestled with you.

you, the great homesickness we could never shake off,
you, the forest that always surrounded us,

you, the song we sang in every silence,
you dark net threading through us,

on the day you made us you created yourself,
and we grew sturdy in your sunlight…

let your hand rest on the rim of heaven now and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours,  translation anita barrows and joanna macy

Another passing thing

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Looking Outside

Clinging is weakened by the activity of meditation. For example, we sit quietly and experience the flow of feeling, the dependent and changing experience of our bodily form, and all the “I should do it” programs twitching in the mind. And through meditating we can unhook the reactions and reflex-activities by focusing on their changeability. This practice, although based on ethics and sense-restraint, doesn’t attempt to affect the topics that the mind is carrying in its perceptions and volitions….so that whatever our impulse or perception is, it’s just seen as another passing thing.

Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

 

The door

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door 14

Consciously or unconsciously, we avoid facing things as they are in themselves

and so we want God to open a door for us which is beyond…

(but) to find life’s purpose we must go through the door of ourselves

Jiddu Krisnamurti

Slowly

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chinese mountains

Smile,

breathe,

and go slowly. 

Thich Nhat Hanh

O snail

climb Mount Fuji

but slowly slowly

Kobayashi Issa, 1763 –  1828, Japanese Buddhist priest and poet

Staying with the uncertainty

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black_white

Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

Hafiz

Ever-widening circles of trust.

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holding hands

Many of us have been convinced – by our society, by our own experiences in life, and by our own logic, that we cannot trust our own natural state of being. We turn away from ourselves and our experiences. In mindfulness practice we are learning not to destroy or control our feelings, but to discover them and be present with them. We begin to see how they work when we enter fully into them and give them room. We begin to see how we create our emotional lives and reactions. In this process, we learn to trust awareness and direct presence more and more deeply. As we explore the layers of our fear, our trust expands into wider and wider circles of who we are. The process of awakening can be understood as ever-widening circles of trust. …… Fearlessness is not necessarily the absence of fear. It is a positive quality that can exist side by side with fear, overcoming the limitations arising out of fear.

Gil Fronsdal, The Issue at hand