Sunday Quote: The whole story

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Everything has to do with loving and not loving

Rumi

A possibility of beauty

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What do I do with all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down?  

The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is a possibility of beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek?

Annie Dilliard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Fully alive

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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