Tag: heart

Not dwelling in thoughts

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When we learn to move beyond mistaken concepts and see clearly, we no longer solidify reality. We see waves coming and going, arising and passing. We see that life, composed of this mind and body, is in a state of continual, constant transformation and flux. There is always the possibility of radical change. Every moment – not just poetically or figuratively, but literally – every moment we are dying and being reborn, we and all of life.

Sharon Salzberg, Loving-Kindness – The Revolutionary Art of Happiness

Friendships that support

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When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

Henri Nouwen

Choosing to be who we are

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Happiness is accepting and choosing life, not just submitting grudgingly to it.  It comes when we choose to be who we are, to be ourselves, at this present moment of our lives; we choose life at it is, with all its joys, pain and conflicts.  Happiness is living and seeking the truth, together with others in community, and assuming responsibility for our lives and the lives of others. It is accepting the fact that we are not infinite, but can enter into a personal relationship with the Infinite, discovering the universal truth and justice that transcends all cultures: each person is unique and sacred. We are not just seeking what others want us to be or to conform to the expectations of family, friends, or local ways of being. We have chosen to be who we are, with all this is beautiful and broken in us. We do not slip away from life and live in a world of illusions, dreams, or nightmares. We become present to reality and to life. We become present to reality and to life so that we are free to live according to our personal conscience, our sacred sanctuary, where love resides within us and we see others as they are in the depth of their being. We are not letting the light of life within us be crushed, and we are not crushing it in others. On the contrary, all we want is for the light of others to shine.

Jean Vanier, Essential Writings

All life as practice

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing, or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of ones being, satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some arena, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.

Martha Graham, American dancer and choreographer.

Not seeking elsewhere

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Joy isn’t something we have to find.

Joy is who we are if we’re not preoccupied with something else.

When we try to find joy, we are simply adding a thought – and an unhelpful one, at that – onto the basic fact of what we are.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Trusting and falling

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If we surrender
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things
because they are in God’s heart
they have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall patiently,  to trust our heaviness
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

Rilke, Book of Hours, II, 16