Tag: heart

Not giving up on ourselves

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Climbing Meldon Hill - geograph.org.uk - 1478803.jpg

The idea of developing courage doesn’t seem to trigger people’s inadequacies. I think they know they have some courage. The problem is they think they’re supposed to be courageous in facing the outside world, whereas what is so profoundly transformative is the courage to look at yourself. It’s the courage to not give up on yourself, even though you do see your aggression, jealousy, meanness, and so on. And it turns out that in facing these things, we develop not self-denigration but compassion for our shared humanity.

Pema Chodron

photo Derek Harper

 

Forgetting ourselves

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children playing 2

No despair of ours can alter the reality of things,
or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.

Indeed we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us,
for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.

Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget
ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the
general dance.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

 

How we look

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A mother lovingly looking at her baby

It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves.

The least of things with a meaning is always worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: The practice of psychotherapy

Looking inside

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unmask
A human being has so many skins inside, 
covering the depths of the heart. 
 
We know so many things, but we don’t know ourselves! 
 
Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox’s or a bear’s, 
cover the soul. 
 
Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there. 

 Meister Eckhart

As we go along

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File:Skeffling Clough - geograph.org.uk - 316598.jpg

You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

photo Paul Glazzard

What you love

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File:A young girl uses a trowel to dig a hole for plants in the pollinator garden.jpg

It is very important that you only do what you love to do.

You may be poor, you may go hungry, you may lose your car, you may have to move into a shabby place to live, but you will totally live.

And at the end of your days you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do.

Otherwise, you will do things only for a reason, to please other people, and you will never have lived.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross