Tag: heart

Not limiting ourselves

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Our identity, which seems so reliable, so substantial,  is in fact very fluid, very  dynamic. There are unlimited possibilities to what we might think, what we might feel, and how we might experience reality. We have what it takes to free ourselves from the suffering of a fixed reality and connect with the fundamental ….mystery of our being, which has no fixed identity. Your sense of yourself – who you think you are at a relative level – is a very restricted version of who you truly are. 

Pema Chodron, Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change

The driving force

Karl Duffy5 Comments

 

Today, November 2nd, is traditionally the day that we remember those close to us who have died and gone before us

All men should strive to learn before they die,

what they are running from,

and to, and why.

James Thurber

Softening our bodies and mind

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Contentment doesn’t mean we are always happy about life events or deny the reality of pain. We cultivate contentment by cultivating the inner witness who is able to respond to life from a place of calmness, peace, and tranquility. So it is the ‘still heart’ — the heart of equanimity — that can welcome everything in. Instead of always living with a sense of dissatisfaction about our lives, or anticipation over what comes next, we live in the knowledge that this moment contains everything we need to be at peace, to experience freedom, to develop compassion for ourselves and others, to find God.  When we experience contentment we have softened our bodies, minds, and hearts so that we are able to release the unconscious resistances we hold to our own experience.

Christine Valters Paintner, Lectio Divina

Sunday Quote: Kindness

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Modern society prizes intelligence, achievements or efficiency…

What wisdom can you find

that is greater than kindness?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Quelle sagesse trouverez-vous supérieure à la bonté?

Like a mirror

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The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror;

it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing;

it receives, but does not keep.

Chuang-tzu, 4th Century BC

One world at a time

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Satisfaction is very close and simple: the strange happiness of completely joining with whatever we are doing in that moment… When the writer Thoreau was on his deathbed, a visitor asked him – “from where you lie, so close to the brink of the dark river, can you say how the opposite shore looks to you?”

It is said that he replied gently, “One world at a time”

Susan Murphy, Upside Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the ordinary