Some wisdom for our first full week of work, with its pressures and pulls
The pressure and pull of a noisy day denies us the comfort of God. It is a day in which we are buffeted by the world around us and left at the mercy of the clatter and jangle of our own hearts. To be a contemplative we must put down the cacophony of the world around us and go inside ourselves to wait for the God who is a whisper not a storm.
Joan Chittister, One House
If the purpose of life is to ‘feel the rapture of being alive,’ and if our capacity to feel is crippled by old wounds and a lack of emotional education, then it follows that an important part of the spiritual path is to heal the heart and to become emotionally intelligent. As we work on opening the heart, we will confront, over and over, our fearful habit of closing to pain. The price for staying heart blind is a life unlived. The Dalai Lama has gone as far as saying that ‘the tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness.’ Heartfulness work is the cessation of avoidance. Jung said, ‘What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate,’ and nowhere is this more true than in the realm of the heart
Elizabeth Lesser
We tend to bestow our judging mind with unquestioned power and authority, but this risks an inaccurate self-perception. Instead, listen and question, without believing every word. Take back your right to evaluate the credibility of judgments and your own self-worth. By clarifying your relationship to the judging mind, you can reclaim your power to establish a more accurate self-perception and stable sense of well-being.
Mark Coleman, From Suffering to Peace: The True Promise of Mindfulness
From William Stafford, A Ritual to Read to Each Other:
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
And I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind….
Seeing a person free of everything we thought of him or her is a most extraordinary event. Things become luminous. We realize our common nature of no-nature. This is seeing from the heart – compassion.
Katherine Thanas, The Truth of This Life
Thoughts evoke emotions, tensions, excitement and stress, and can bring on exhaustion and sickness. Awareness reveals this simply to be so. Awareness is freedom from wanting to improve oneself or to put oneself down. It … opens one up to whatever else is happening this instant: breathing, a bird singing, a motor humming, the wind blowing, thoughts moving, the body tensing and relaxing…
Toni Packer
A monk asked Shito “How does one become free?”. Shito replied, “Who has bound you?”
That’s the question, who binds you? Don’t look outside, look into the mind, investigate the opinionated mind. Become familiar with its opinions and judgments; then you wont be so vulnerable to them. Our effort is to release the mind from its ordinary opinions and see revealed a new universe. Nothing binds us but the habituated mind.
Katherine Thanas, The Truth of This Life
