Tag: Gentleness

Resting the mind

Karl Duffy4 Comments

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All mental activity, all these choices and possibilities, is confusing and even exhausting. Just as the body needs regular rest, so does the mind. To rest the mind in complete stillness, in pure awareness, is to return it to its original nature, its natural state. We don’t need to narrate all the events of our life. We don’t need the mind to comment internally on everything and everyone we encounter. This narration, these comments, separates us from just experiencing life as it is.

Jan Chozen Bays, How to Train a Wild Elephant

Give this gift today

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil.

….and accepting

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Both our upbringing and our culture provide the immediate breeding ground for this contemporary epidemic of feeling deficient and unworthy. Many of us have grown up with parents who gave us messages about where we fell short and how we should be different from the way we are. We were told to be special, to look a certain way, to act a certain way, to work harder, to win, to succeed, to make a difference, and not to be too demanding, shy or loud. An indirect but insidious message for many has been, “Don’t be needy.” Because our culture so values independence, self-reliance and strength, even the word needy evokes shame. To be considered as needy is utterly demeaning, contemptible. And yet, we all have needs —physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual. So the basic message is, “Your natural way of being is not okay; to be acceptable you must be different from the way you are.”

Tara Brach, Awakening From the Trance of Unworthiness

Planting seeds today

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Do not judge each day
by the harvest you reap
but by the seeds
that you plant.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Being non-aggressive towards ourselves

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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Coming back to the present moment takes some effort, but the effort is very light. The instruction is to “touch and go.” We touch thoughts by acknowledging them as thinking and then we let them go. It’s a way of relaxing our struggle, like touching a bubble with a feather. It’s a non-aggressive approach to being here.

Pema Chodron

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Kindness towards ourselves…

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May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.

May you never place walls between the light and yourself.

May your angel free you from the prisons of guilt, fear, disappointment, and despair.

May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in belonging.

John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes

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