Tag: heart

Quieten the chatter

Karl Duffy3 Comments


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

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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

Simplify

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I want to learn how to walk down the ladder gracefully. 

I have this image – I would like to get smaller and smaller in a relevant way.

Carly Simon, on what she learned from dealing with cancer and other life setbacks, quoted in Sara Davidson, The First Day of the Rest of My Life

Sunday Quote: No need to want more

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The beauty of a mountain is that it is so much like a mountain, and of water that it is so much like water

Zen saying

Always being born, always dying

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To regress in a certain way is to return to origins, to step back from the battle line of existence, to remember the gods and spirits and elements of nature, including your own pristine nature, the person you were at the beginning. You return to the womb of imagination so that your pregnancy can recycle. You are always being born, always dying to the day to find the restorative waters of night. Darkness is natural, one of the life processes. There may be some promise, the mere suggestion that life is going forward, even though you have no sense of where you are headed. It’s a time of waiting and trusting. My attitude as a therapist in these situations is not to be anxious for a conclusion or even understanding.

You have to sit with these things and in due time let them be revealed for what they are.

Thomas Moore, The Dark Night of the Soul

Don’t get in the way

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We have been given bad advice about the ego. 

We know we need it

but we think we are it.

Mark Epstein, Advice not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself