Tag: Awareness

The key insight

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Groundlessness, uncertainty, insecurity, vulnerability — these are words that ordinarily carry a negative connotation. We’re generally wary of these feelings and try to elude them in any way possible.

But groundlessness isn’t something we need to avoid. The same feeling we find so troubling when we open to it can be experienced as a huge relief, as freedom from all restraints. It can be experienced as a mind so unbiased and relaxed that we feel expansive and joyful.

Pema Chodron, Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change

The small miracles of everyday

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You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

John O’Donohue, For One Who Is Exhausted, a Blessing

Cefalu, Sicily

What is in front of you

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Happiness lies not in finding what is missing,

but in finding what is present

Tara Brach

Don’t hide love

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Don’t hide love.

If you feel it, express it – not to demand that others love you back, but simply to live outwardly the best of what you feel inwardly.

The worst that can happen to your heart is not rejection by another person but failure to act on the love you feel. 

Martha Beck

Sunday Quote: Reaching the mystery

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We all have an deep seated drive to seek happiness somewhere else, with special conditions

Reaching the mystery is nothing other than breaking through

and grabbing an ordinary person’s life.

Zen saying

Stretch upwards

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Saw some Giant Redwood trees walking in the grounds of Emo Court last weekend. They are quite young compared to the ones in California – only 170 years – being planted in 1853, but still an impressive size

Some of these trees have been here since Jesus walked on water

Some of these trees have been here

since Vikings drove their boats

onto the shores of Newfoundland…

Some of these trees have survived lightning strikes and forest fires…..

They have grown beyond

their trauma and focus now

on the daily climb, the adding-on

of needle and bark, on nature’s drive

to rise above and see beyond

until the day when death will fell them

and the earth will add them to its riches.

We can be like these trees, pull on the layers of living like fine

new garments, house the needy

in the caverns of our grief, grow

beyond the stories of our scars

stretch our branches toward the bristling stars.

Tamara Madison, American poet, Sequoia Sempervirens [extract], from the A Year of Being Here blog