Tag: Health

What to remember in a time of change

Karl Duffy2 Comments

A similar theme, this time from the Christian tradition:

Nothing lasts. No single thing can consume our entire life’s meaning. No single thing can give us total satisfaction. Nothing is worth everything: neither past, nor present nor future. It isn’t true that the loss of any single thing will destroy us. Everything in life has some value and life is full of valuable things, things worth living for, things worth doing, things worth becoming, things worth loving again. It is only a matter of being detached enough from one thing to be open to everything else.

The essence of life is not to find the one thing that satisfies us  but to realize that nothing can ever completely satisfy us.

Joan Chittister, After Great Pain: Finding a Way Out

Self-forgiveness

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Forgiveness 0001.jpg

There’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy.

Pema Chödrön

When we practice meditation, we practice a double movement: there is a movement of return to the breath, a movement of recollection of presence, of samadhi — and there is a movement of mindfulness, of allowing everything to be just as it is. Last Sunday, I realized that the movement of return can also be a movement of allowing, of self-forgiveness. All the prodigal sons and daughters of our thoughts and dreams and gnarly little complexes are welcome to come to the feast of this present moment.

Tracy Cochran, Be a Lighthouse

photo scem.info

It’s mid-week: Jump into life

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Child01.jpg

Hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!

Think… and think… while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time
            before death.

If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten —
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest
that does all the work.

Kabir.

photo GFDL