Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it.
It is all we ever have, so we night as well work with it rather than struggling against it.
We might as well make it our friend and teacher rather than our enemy
Pema Chodron
photo: St Francis and the Wolf, Monterosso al Mare, Italy
So the intelligent way of working with emotions is to try to relate with their basic substance, the abstract quality of the emotions, so to speak. The basic “isness” quality of the emotions, the fundamental nature of the emotions, is just energy. And if one is able to relate with energy, then the energies have no conflict with you. They become a natural process
Chogyam Trungpa, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation
Strong weather systems here in Ireland, the UK, and in the US, dominate the news headlines. A reminder that a lot of things are outside our control and an insight into the fact that impermanence is a part of life: calm and storm, darkness and light, cold and warmth.
The capacity to suffer wounding and learn to adapt to it is crucial to the development of self. . . We have wounds, and the clusters of energy that accompany them, because we have a life history. The deeper question is whether we have the wounds or they have us.
James Hollis, The Eden Project.
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Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what’s going on.
Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty
It’s not possible to be afraid of a baby. The way she looks at us, her smile, her eyes, even her fragility, her trust and her innocence seem to touch even the most profound places in the hearts of us adults. The child is able to penetrate the walls that we have constructed around our hearts to defend ourselves, to protect ourselves, to prove that we are independent, competent, and strong. A child reveals the child who is hidden inside each of us, the child whom we have buried behind these impenetrable walls of protection, of strength, and of our need to win. Within our societies based on rivalry, we are often afraid to show our weakness. Admitting weakness can be dangerous since it might lead to rejection. Instead we feel that we need to show our competence, our capability, our power, our knowledge. If not, we risk begin wounded, rejected, isolated, and scorned. The weakness of the child – especially of a very young child – does the opposite: it attracts us and makes us smile; it leads us to tenderness and communion. It awakens kindness. …….awakened by something outside of me, and yet it is what is deepest within me. It is “me. All of us, at the deepest level of our being, are wounded children who are searching for love, for tenderness.
Jean Vanier, Christmas Letter, 2011
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Sit quietly, and listen for a voice that will say, ‘Be more silent.’
Your old life was a frantic running from silence.
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Dwell in silence. Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.
Rumi
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