Imitate the trees.
Learn to lose in order to recover,
and remember that nothing stays the same for long,
not even pain.
May Sarton
Tag: growth
Conscious living
The real goal of a therapy is not a “cure”, for the human condition is not a disease. Yes, real, resistant problems of daily life can and must be addressed and the resources of consciousness brought fully to bear on their resolution. But the real gift of a therapy, or of any truly considered life, is that one achieves a deepened conversation around the meaning of one’s journey – a conversation without which one lives a received life, not one’s own, a superficial life, or a life in service to complexes or ideologies.
James Hollis, What Matter most: Living a more considered Life
photo alexei kuprianov
Taking things personally
It’s true that different people have different mind stuff to work with, but essentially there comes about a realization that the core of the feeling of suffering comes from something we all do: we take things personally. And you can’t stop doing this simply as an idea. The practice involves cessation – letting go of “self” through directly knowing “self”. This must occur by feeling out and examining some pretty well-known positions ….”I cant do it” is one of them, and the list goes on through every kind of self-view about “I’m not worthy/good enough”, “It’s not good enough for me” ” I have a lot of karma to work out”…In the course of practice, all of these self-views come and go continually until gradually the realization of their impermanence begins to sink in.
Ajahn Sucitto, The Dawn of the Dhamma
Remaining astonished by life
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension,
which we feel as paralysis because
we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.
Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet
photo of the coffee shop in Kilcullen, called An Tearmann, which is Irish for “Refuge” or “Sanctuary”
Withdrawing permission
In standing still and receiving life with all its adversity and sorrow, you have withdrawn your permission for suffering to define your life. You have also withdrawn your consent to living in fear. Something profound happens in your heart when you turn with kindness toward all the circumstances of pain which you have previously repressed, dismissed or fled from. There is a softening, an opening, a deepening capacity and willingness to understand sorrow and its cause.
Christine Feldman, Compassion
photo shaun ferguson
Dissolving fear
We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if we could only arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
hoto raul654
Mindfulbalance 