Tag: impermanence

Subtract

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The notion of a spirituality of subtraction comes from Meister Eckhart (c.1260-1327), the medieval Dominican mystic. He said the spiritual life has much more to do with subtraction than it does with addition. Yet I think most Christians today are involved in great part in a spirituality of addition.

The capitalist worldview is the only one most of us have ever known. The nature of the capitalist mind is that things (and often people!) are there for me. Finally, even God becomes an object for my consumption. Religion looks good on my résumé, and anything deemed “spiritual” is a check on my private worthiness list. Some call it spiritual consumerism. It is not the Gospel.

Richard Rohr, Radical Grace

Free of it

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[There are} things that ordinarily you would never dream of being able to tolerate, and having no motivation to in fact tolerate. And then, here is a place where not only can it be tolerated on the surface, but it actually turns out that you don’t need to tolerate it.  . . . you can actually welcome it and simply let it be as it is, and then not generate a big story of “this is killing me” and so forth.

That was just one … particular moment. but it showed me something that I’ve never really forgotten, which is that it’s possible to turn towards what you most want to run away from. And then the whole landscape changes when you do that, because there was something in you, in me, that was recognizing that that sensation was not my sensation. And therefore I was already free of it in that moment. It’s not like I had to tolerate it and get good at grinning and bearing it and then it would go away. But no, at its most intense, I can be equanimous about it. And it wasn’t a thought, it was a direct experience.

Jon Kabat Zinn’s insight during a silent retreat which led him to apply mindfulness meditation to mainstream medicine

Sunday Quote: Two sides

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Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Manon, Ballerina

The movement of life

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A season or an hour of the day is a visitation whose return is not always assured. Every spring following a long winter feels as miraculous as if we are seeing it for the first time. Out of the dead garden rises abundance beyond a winter eye’s comprehension…..To make friends with the hours is to come to know all the hidden correspondences inside our own bodies that match the richness and movement of life we see around us. 

David Whyte, Time is a Season

Free medicine

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The first day of Spring in the Celtic Calendar, the important feast of Imbolc, halfway between solstices, with themes of light and fertility, hidden seeds and new life.

Lord, the air smells good today, straight from the mysteries
within the inner courts of God.

A grace like new clothes thrown across the garden,
free medicine for everybody.
The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise.

Rumi

Peace

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Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.

Pema Chodron