Tag: heart

Looking for treasure outside ourselves

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We can spend a good portion of our life waiting for some time in the future when we have the time to do the things we want, or the things we feel are good for us. We look forward to our holidays, or to weekend seminars or to doing a course, believing that then we will finally get it together. It is rare that things actually happen in this way. The conditions are already available to us, in the moments of each day. We can start with where we are, not matter how messy that is, or how distracted we feel.

Solitude is not found so much by looking outside the boundaries of your own dwelling, as by staying within.  Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future.  Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

Simple Daily Practices: Schedule the time

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If meditation is a priority, then it is helpful to take the word literally and put meditation first. An example would be my rule of not turning on the computer before I’ve meditated. Simple, but effective. Probably the most trenchant advice I ever heard was in eight words from Suzuki Roshi, “Organize your life so that you can sit well”.

Loaves and fishes

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This is not the age of information.
This is not the age of information.

Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.

This is the time of loaves
and fishes.

People are hungry,
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.

David Whyte, Loaves and Fishes from The House of Belonging

What happiness is not

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We tend to equate happiness with two things, pleasure and lack of tension. Hence we fantasize that for us to be happy we would need to be in a situation within which we would be free of all the tensions that normally flood into our lives from: pressure, tiredness, interpersonal friction, physical pain, financial worry, disappointment in our jobs, frustration with our churches, frustration with our favorite sports teams, and every other headache and heartache that can appear. Happiness, as it is superficially conceived of, means perfect health, perfectly fulfilled relationships, a perfect job, no anxiety or tension in life, no disappointments, and the time and money to enjoy the good life.

But that isn’t what constitutes happiness. Meaning is what constitutes happiness and meaning isn’t contingent upon pain and tension being absent from our lives. C.S. Lewis taught that happiness and unhappiness color backwards: If our lives end up happy, we realize that we have always been happy even through the trying times, just as if our lives end up unhappy we realize that we have always been unhappy, even during the pleasurable periods of our lives. Where we end up ultimately in terms of meaning will determine whether our lives have been happy or unhappy. Happiness has a lot more to do with meaning than with pleasure.

Ron Rolheiser, Meaning and Happiness.

Sunday Quote: Being comfortable in our own skin

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If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path.

Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation

Love and risk

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To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that  casket –  safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

C.S. Lewis, The Fours Loves