Tag: Be fully present

Love and fear

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Happiness, anxiety, joy, resentment — we have many words for the many emotions we experience in our lifetimes. But deep down, there are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt.

We have to make a decision to be in one place or the other. If you don’t actively choose love, you will find yourself in a place of either fear or one of its component feelings. Every moment offers the choice to choose one or the other. And we must continually make these choices, especially in difficult circumstances when our commitment to love, instead of fear, is challenged.

Elizabeth Kubler Ross

Two extremes

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There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss.

You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes. Since the hole is so enormous and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it.

There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.


Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love

Refuse nothing

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Bring back your light towards the inside.
Enlighten the surroundings.
Open your hands and refuse nothing.

Fuyo Dokai, 1043-1118, Zen Buddhist monk

Taste everything

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O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything, all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather,

to breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

Denise Levertov, O Taste and See

Making our soul

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The human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul.

Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul

James Hillman

How much we are missing

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Everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is a measure of our gratefulness. Day and night, gifts keep pelting down on us. If we were aware of this, gratefulness would overwhelm us. But we go through life in a daze.

A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is; a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep. How much we are missing in life by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them.

Eyes see only light, ears hear only sound, but a listening heart perceives meaning. Everything is a gift.

Gratefulness is the key to a happy life, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy – because we will always want to have something else or something more.

David Steindl-Rast