Unconditional love does not require a passive acceptance of whatever happens in the name of love. Rather, in the real spaces of our daily relationships, it means maintaining a commitment that no condition will keep us from bringing all of who we are to each other honestly.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
photo aallen
Don’t ask what the world needs.
Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Howard Thurman, African-American author and Civil Rights leader, in conversation with Gil Bailie
It took a long time for the analytical world to look at the importance of the way a baby is held, and yet when you come to think of it, this is of primary importance. The question of holding brings up the whole issue of human reliability.
Winnicott
By not stopping our thoughts and feelings in meditation, we are paving the way for gentle ways of being with our experience. When thoughts are intentionally cut off, that is often an act of harming. if it is done aggressively, even with a miniscule amount of force, it supports and furthers the tendency to get rid of thoughts rather than to get to know them. Our ability to get to know our thoughts and feelings depends on our ability to stay with them, and staying with them depends on our capacity not to get rid of them. Holding our experience gently, thoughts and feeling come and go in their own time.
Jason Siff, Unlearning Meditation
Your notions of happiness may be very dangerous. Happiness can only be possible in the here and now. Go back and examine deeply your notions and ideas of happiness. So let go of what you believed yesterday. Let go of what you thought last week you needed to be happy. The conditions of happiness that are in your life now are enough.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Do not judge each day
by the harvest you reap
but by the seeds
that you plant.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence, there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling in the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth. If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have not rest, God does not bless our work. If we twist our lives out of shape in order to fill every corner of them with action and experience, God will seem silently to withdraw from our hearts and leave us empty.
Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island
photo : jon rawlinson
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