Springiness

We sometimes need to change our understanding of strength to include yielding and gentleness. Not fighting with the reality of wind and being able to bend and go back are realities we can learn from the natural world.

Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.

Bruce Lee

The tree is made strong and resilient by its grounded root system. These roots take nourishment from the ground and grow strong. Grounding also allows the tree to be resilient so that it can yield to the winds of change and not be uprooted. Springiness is the facility to ground and ‘unground’ in a rhythmical way. This buoyancy is a dynamic form of grounding.

Aggressiveness is the biological ability to be vigorous and energetic, especially when using instinct and force. In the immobility (traumatized) state, these assertive energies are inaccessible. The restoration of healthy aggression is an essential part in the recovery from trauma. 

Peter Levine, Walking the Tiger

Sunday Quote: Go deeper

You have been walking the water’s edge, holding up your robes to keep them dry.

You must dive naked under, deeper, under a thousand times deeper.

Love flows down.

Rumi

Beautify our gaze

We have often heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  This is usually taken to mean that the sense of beauty is utterly subjective; there is no accounting for taste because each person’s taste is different.  The statement has another, more subtle meaning: if our style of looking becomes beautiful, then beauty will become visible and shine forth for us. We will be surprised to discover beauty in unexpected places where the ungraceful eye would never linger.  The graced eye can glimpse beauty anywhere, for beauty does not reserve itself for special elite moments or instances; it does not wait for perfection but is present already secretly in everything.  When we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes our joy and our sanctuary.

John O Donohue, Beauty: Rediscovering The True Sources of Compassion, Serenity, and Hope

Really taste life

Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry.

Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Ernest Hemingway

New and wholesome

Each time we go out, the world is open and free; it offers itself so graciously to our hearts, to create something new and wholesome from it each day. It is a travesty of possibility and freedom to think we have no choice, that things are the way they are and that the one street, the one right way is all that is allotted to us. Certainty is a subtle destroyer…

John O Donohue, Eternal Echoes

Chosen

True freedom and the end of suffering is living in such a way as if you had completely chosen whatever you feel or experience at this moment.

Eckhart Tolle