There is an inner wakefulness…
that will eventually
startle us back
to the truth of
who we are.
Rumi
Tag: heart
Fearless receptivity
We can’t travel with others in territory that we haven’t explored ourselves. It is the exploration of our own inner life that enables us to form an empathetic bridge to the other person. It’s our task to trust, to listen, and to pay careful attention to the changing experience. At the deepest level, we are being asked to cultivate a kind of fearless receptivity.
This is a journey of continuous discovery in which we will always be entering new territory. We have no idea how it will turn out, and it takes courage and flexibility. We find a balance. The journey is a mystery we need to live into, opening, risking, and forgiving constantly.
Frank Ostaseski
photo juanedc
Becoming still
In the stillness of the quiet, if we listen,
we can hear the whisper of the heart
giving strength to weakness,
courage to fear,
hope to despair.
Howard Thurman, American Author, pastor and civil rights leader
photo bananenfalter
A troubled world
With again more news of violence and hatred….
Ultimately we have just one moral duty:
to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves more and more
and to reflect it towards others, and the more peace there is in us,
the more peace there will be in our troubled world.
Etty Hillesum, killed in Auschwitz in November 1943 aged 21.
photo lewis collard.com
Taking ourselves less seriously
As the wind loves to call things to dance
May your gravity be lightened by grace
John O Donohue, To Bless the Space between Us
photo ceridwen
In the presence of
Joy is the meeting place of deep intentionality and self forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us .. with what formally seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection: the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us.
To allow our selves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious, worried self felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a well loved familiar face – I was here and you were here and together we made a world.
David Whyte , Consolations : The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
