We live a lot in our heads, our worries and fears. Meditation involves settling back into the support offered by the breath-in-the-body and getting a feel for the right balance there. This allows us to stay in touch with where we are, which balances the thinking mind’s preoccupation with who we are, with doing and with how we appear.
Living calls for the art of the wrestler, not the dancer
Staying on your feet is all;
there is no need for pretty steps
Marcus Aurelius
Even in the midst of great pain, Lord,
I praise you for that which is.
I will not refuse this grief
or close myself to this anguish.
Let shallow men pray for ease:
“Comfort us; shield us from sorrow.”
I pray for whatever you send me,
and I ask to receive it as your gift.
You have put a joy in my heart
greater than all the world’s riches.
I lie down trusting the darkness,
for I know that even now you are here.
Psalm 4, from Stephen Mitchell, A Book of Psalms: Selected and Adapted from the Hebrew.
We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender. Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty.
John O Donohue
photo benson kua
Look at love – how it tangles
with the one fallen in love
look at spirit – how it fuses with earth
giving it new life.
Why are you so busy with this or that or good or bad
pay attention to how things blend
why talk about all the known and the unknown
see how the unknown merges into the known
why think separately of this life and the next
when one is born from the last
look at your heart and tongue
one feels but deaf and dumb
the other speaks in words and signs
look at water and fire, earth and wind
enemies and friends all at once
the wolf and the lamb, the lion and the deer
far away yet together
look at the unity of this
spring and winter, manifested in the equinox
you too must mingle my friends
since the earth and the sky
are mingled just for you and me
be like sugarcane, sweet yet silent
don’t get mixed up with bitter words
my beloved grows right out of my own heart
how much more union can there be.
Rumi, Look at Love
Life isn’t as serious as my mind makes it out to be.
Eckhart Tolle
photo pam
To listen to your soul is to stop fighting with life – to stop fighting when things fall apart; when they don’t go our way, when we get sick, when we are betrayed or mistreated or misunderstood. To listen to the soul is to slow down, to feel deeply, to see ourselves clearly, to surrender to discomfort and uncertainty and to wait.
Elizabeth Lesser.
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