A post for the made-up “Blue Monday”, the day in the year, they tell us, we are most likely to feel gloomy.
Perhaps the best advice for our physical and mental health this week, as we bring our inner self to work with whatever outward situation we find ourselves in…. and not from a modern self-help book.
A cheerful heart is good medicine
Proverbs 17:22
photo david shankbone
Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now.
The conditions are always impossible
Doris Lessing
photo np&djjewell
Life has no meaning.
Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life.
It is a waste to be asking the question
when you are the answer.
Joseph Campbell
The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking,
it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.
If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
photo of Tibetan prayer wheel, Etnografiska museum, Stockholm
The first week back to work over. Nature has a gentler pace than the one imposed by our minds and seems to have different phases – growth, slowing down, covering over and rest. Thus, despite all the clamour to change we hear in these first weeks, we can choose to have some natural rest and a time of quiet, not always striving – allowing the different parts of our lives to just be .
You begin to see that there are seasons in your life, in the same way as there as seasons in nature. There are times to cultivate, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally there are those times that are cold and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are.
Chogram Trungpa Rinpoche, How to Rule
Often the message this time of year is to completely re-shape or transform ourselves. This can sometimes mask a kind of aggression towards ourselves and suggest that most change needs to be dramatic. In most cases acceptance, integration and starting over are what is really needed :
That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.
Mark Nepo, Hearing the Cries of the World
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