Tag: heart

Grateful

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A special greeting for Thanksgiving for all those who read and follow the Blog in the United States. Gratitude helps us to focus on what we have, and not on what we lack, 

I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite – only a sense of existence. I am ready to try this for the next ten thousand years, and exhaust it. How sweet to think of my extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on the bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment. 

Henry David Thoreau, Letter, Friends and Followers, 1856

Sunday Quote: The path

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It is the heart that knows the path. The mind is just there to organize the steps

Jeff Brown

A heart that can see

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When Munindra Ji, a vipassana meditation teacher, was asked why he practiced, his response was, ‘So I will see the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road as I walk to town each day.’

Tara Brach,   A Heart That Is Ready for Anything

Our monastery

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Our hermitage is the act of living with attention in the midst of things; amid the rhythms of work and love, the bath with the child, the endlessly growing paperwork, the ever-present likelihood of war, the necessity for taking action to help the world. For us, a good spiritual life is permeable and robust. It faces things squarely, knowing the smallest moments are all we have, and that even the smallest moment is full of happiness.

John Tarrant, The Light inside the Dark

Quieten the chatter

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Sometimes it seems almost everything in our culture conspires to distance us from heart and soul. So many messages are ads, trying to sell us something of questionable usefulness while ruthlessly pandering to our vanity, insecurity, or unhappiness – new toys, fashion, entertainment, or insurance against the inevitabilities of life. Few people ask the bigger questions.

Constant superficial conversation keeps us from noticing what’s going on with us emotionally or spiritually or in our bodies. Small talk alienates us from ourselves- perhaps a purpose as well as a result. In order to approach the deeper truths of our soul, we must quiet the inner chatter.

Bill Plotkin, Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

The real life within

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You know that the seed is inside the chestnut tree and inside the seed there are blossoms of the tree and the chestnuts and the shade. So inside the human body there is the seed, and inside the seed there is the human body again

Thinkers, listen…. tell me what you know of that which is not inside the soul: Take a jug of water and set it down on the water – now it has water inside and water outside. We shouldn’t give it a name, in case silly people start talking again about the body and the soul.

If you want the truth, I’ll tell you the truth: Listen to the secret sound, the real sound which is inside you.   The One nobody talks of  speaks the secret sound to himself, and he is the One who has made it all.

Kabir