If you gently help yourself back to the present moment,
you see how life keep stumbling along
and how you may actually find your way through another ordinary or impossible day
Annie Lamott
Tag: Awareness
How to develop the heart
You shouldn’t chase after the past
or place expectations on the future.
What is past is left behind.
The future is as yet unreached.
Whatever quality is present
you clearly see, right there,
right there.
Not taken in; unshaken.
That’s how you develop the heart.
Bhaddekaratta Sutta
Making Space
The life that we have in our mind, the life that is a reflection of our planning, the life that has been constructed out of bits and pieces in our environment — external conditioning, things we have observed in other people, things that influential people have told us — is actually not who we are. Life emerges out of the silence of our inner being. When I was in graduate school I worked with a Jungian analyst, June Singer. She used to say, “Work expands to fill all of the available space.” The problem is not the amount of things you have in your life, it’s the attitude. It’s your fear of space.
Reginald Ray, Busyness is laziness
Each thing today
You may be capable of great things,
but life consists of small things
Deng Ming-Dao, Chinese author of 365 Tao
A hunger for eternity
Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.
Mary Oliver, Upstream
Our agenda
My analyst once said to me, “You must make your fears your agenda.” When we do take on that agenda, for all the anxiety engendered, we feel better because we know we are living in ‘bonne foi’ [good faith] with ourselves. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the perception that some things are more important to us than what we fear
James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul
