Experiencing,
rather than trying to have special experiences,
is where real freedom lies
Ezra Bayda, At Home in the Muddy Water
photo berit
Tag: balance
Becoming the ground
Summer was like your house: you know where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.
The days go numb, the wind sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains. It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Trees at Bolton Abbey, Moone. Co Kildare
Sunday Quote: Letting go
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
Meister Eckhart
Experience and interpretation
A crucial skill for minimizing emotional chaos and sustaining clarity in your life is the ability to distinguish between your experience and your interpretation of your experience. Your experience is simply whatever is happening in the moment — a sound, a taste, a bodily sensation, an emotion, any kind of interaction, etc. Your interpretation is your mind’s reaction to that experience. One way to understand this difference to to practice that when you are directly experience a moment of life, you are within it, when you are interpreting it, you are outside it……. The next step toward breaking your habit of automatically interpreting every experience is to practice being mindful from moment to moment of the distinction between experience and interpretation. Begin to notice, ‘Is there a difference between my direct experience of what’s going on and how I’ve interpreted it?’ You’ll need to practice noticing over and over again before you really start to know the difference. The more you’re able to distinguish experience, from interpretation, the more you’ll be able to stay in the moment, the calmer you’ll be, and the more choice you’ll have for responding skillfully to whatever circumstances arise.
Phillip Moffitt, From Emotional Chaos to Clarity
Waking up
All of us know how difficult it is for us to be inside the present moment, to not be asleep to the real riches inside our own lives. The distractions and worries of daily life tend to so consume us that we habitually take for granted what’s most precious to us, our health, the miracle of our senses, the love and friendships that surround us, and the gift of life itself. We go through our daily lives not only with a lack of reflectiveness and lack of gratitude but with a habitual touch of resentment as well, a chronic, grey depression, Robert Moore calls it. We are very much asleep, both to God and to our own lives.
Ron Rolheiser
Weakness
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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