Most think that living a “full life” means living into old age.
But if you are not alive this moment, what makes you think you’ll be alive then?
Stephen and Ondrea Levine, Embracing the Beloved
Tag: heart
Working with our life
Accepting the conditions of existence means first of all admitting our vulnerability to them. When we realize that the givens of life – no matter how ferocious – are not penalties, but ingredients of depth, lovability and character, we can let go of the belief that we are immune (or need to be). “That can’t happen to me” or “How dare they do that to me” changes to “Anything human can happen to me and I will do my best to handle it”. The strength to handle challenges, in fact, is directly proportional to how much we let go of entitlement.
David Richo, How to be an Adult in Relationships
Who we truly are
I had a nice conversation yesterday on the challenge of finding purpose within, in a world which has lost many of the traditional places or containers which used to supply meaning in the past. It is a challenge all through life, and it comes down to having some degree of comfort in our sense of who we are and where we are at this moment. In other words, as Winnicott says, “we gather the personality together from within” by developing a capacity to be at ease with an interior “formlessness and comfortable solitude”, without being afraid, or needing to fill the space with objects and distractions. In this way we unlearn a lot of the messages which come from our restless society or from the wounds of our own history:
To know this spot of inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. Each of us lives in the midst of this ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over, only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core. Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God.
Mark Nepo,
Two tasks
There is much evidence on several levels that there are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong “container” or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold. The first task we take for granted as the very purpose of life, which does not mean that we do it well. The second task is encountered more than sought; few arrive at it with much preplanning, purpose or passion. We are a”first-half-of-life-culture”, largely concerned with surviving successfully. We all try to do what seems like the task that life first hands to us: establishing an identity, a home, relationships, a family, community, security and building a proper platform for our only life. But it takes us much longer to discover “the task within the task” as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing.
Richard Rohr, Falling Upward.
A more spacious mind
Mindfulness practice help us become aware of the gaps and discontinuities that are always appearing spontaneously in the logic of our story lines. For instance even in in the midst of the most intense anger, we might begin to notice flashes of “Why am I so angry?” “Do I need to make such a big deal out of this?” “Is this really as important as I am making it?” Meditation allows us to notice how big mind is always available and flashing into awareness, even when we are most caught up in our stories. Although we often feel most alive when involved in emotional dramas, mediatatio nhelp us realize our baisc ongoing aliveness that is always present in both dramatic and undramatic moments
John Welwood, Befriending Emotion
Sunday Quote: What is here
I discovered the secret of the sea
in meditation upon the dew drop.
Kahil Gibran
Mindfulbalance 