Tag: heart

A juicy creative life

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It’s time to get serious about joy and fulfillment, work on our books, songs, dances, gardens. But perfectionism is always lurking nearby, like the demonic prowling lion in the Old Testament, waiting to pounce.

Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written, or you didn’t go swimming in those warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart.

Don’t let this happen.


 Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, Instructions on Writing and lIfe

Even though

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Piglet noticed that even

though he had a very small heart,

it could hold a rather

large amount of gratitude.

A.A. Milne

Healing

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As the Summer Solstice approaches….

Shamanic healing is not about fixing what has gone wrong.

It’s about growing a new body that heals, ages, and dies consciously.

Alberto Villoldo, 1949 -, Cuban psychologist and medical anthropologist, writer on the healing practices of the Amazon and the Andean shamans.

A motto for life

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More from the always inspiring Dogen. Very little can be added to this as we start another week…

In performing your duties maintain

joyful mind,

kind mind

and great mind

Dogen, 1200 – 1253, Buddhist monk, founder of the Soto school of Zen.

How we live our moments

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Like it or not,

this moment is all we really have ot work with

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Let things pass.

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As a new month is about to begin….

If I had to sum up [meditation] practice in three words, without hesitation, I’d go for “Let things pass.”

In the midst of chaos or deep in one’s inner battlefields, dare to make the experiment of not controlling, of dropping the self. It’s mayhem, but there’s no problem! Far from giving up and far from resignation, letting things pass means distinguishing between the psychodramas (the problems created by conceptual mind) and the genuine tragedies of existence, which call for solidarity, commitment, and perseverance.

Meditating is stripping down, daring to live nakedly in order to give oneself, contributing to the welfare of the world, giving one’s share. Why don’t we look at the day that lies ahead of us not as a store where we can acquire things, but as a clinic, a dispensary of the soul, where together we can recover and advance?

Alexandre Jollien, 1975 – Swiss philosopher and writer