I can give you nothing that has not already its origins within yourself.
I can throw open no picture gallery but your own.
I can help make your own world visible…. that is all.
Herman Hesse
Tag: heart
Quietening the mind
Inside me a hundred beings are putting their fingers to their lips and saying,
“That’s enough for now. Shhhhh.”
Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river.
When the ocean is searching for you, don’t walk
to the language-river.
Listen to the ocean,
and bring your talky business to an end.
Rumi, Send the Chaperones Away
Stop fixing and choosing and doing and making….
The engine that makes this go is taking a step back and trusting the body, trusting the breath, trusting the heart. We’re living our lives madly trying to hold onto everything, and it looks like it might work for awhile but in the end it always fails, and it never was working, and the way to be happy, the way to be loving, the way to be free is to really be willing to let go of everything on every occasion or at least to make that effort. So the practice really works with sitting down, returning awareness to the body, returning awareness to the breath. It usually involves sitting up straight and opening up the body and lifting the body so that the breath can be unrestrained. And then returning the mind to the present moment of being alive, which is anchored in the breath, in the body.
Then, of course, other things happen. You have thoughts, you have feelings. You might have a pain, an ache, visions, memories, reflections. All these things arise, but instead of applying yourself to them and getting entangled in them, you just bear witness to it, let it go, come back to the breathing and the body, and what happens is you release a whole lot of stuff in yourself. A whole new process comes into being that would not have been there if you were always fixing and choosing and doing and making. This way you’re allowing something to take place within your heart.
Norman Fischer
Staying with yourself in moments of difficulty
The importance of meditation, yoga, and other spiritual practices is that they allow you to reconnect with your priorities over and over again. At least for a moment, you let loose of your fears, experience a touch of mental clarity, and feel the sweet breeze of a peaceful mind. You become accustomed to staying with yourself in moments of difficulty and learn not to let them consume your mind. You develop concentration that leads to strength of mind. Certain practices teach you to stay within the body in times of emotional turmoil. Most of all, you find a place outside the ego in which you can receive any experience without neglecting the ego’s needs….. Every human being has this innate capacity to act outside the immediate ego panic. Spiritual practice makes it more likely that it will be accessible in a time of need.
Phillip Moffit, Surrendering to Suffering
Our deepest calling
Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood,
whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be.
As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks –
we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.
Parker Palmer
Not keeping our lives moving
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
Pablo Neruda, Keeping Quiet
Mindfulbalance 