Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
Rilke
Tag: inspiration
Finding our own path
I can not do everything, but I can do something.
I must not fail to do the something that I can do.
Helen Keller.
Stand firm
Doing yoga this morning. The warrior pose. Widening the heart. Being open to all possibilities. We can often identify ourself with who we want to be, or could be in the future, or who our worries say we are. We can forget the strength we actually have and who we really are. The present moment is the only one we have. It is there our happiness is worked out. We lose so much of life by refusing to stay in it, preferring to live in our fears and our worries.
Throw away all thoughts of imaginary things
and stand firm in that which you are.
Kabir
An Autumn poem
One of the most b
eautiful in the English language. In ancient Celtic myths the swan was associated with music, faithfulness and with purity. They frequently symbolized the inner life or the soul. They were especially associated with this time of year and with the Celtic Feast of Samhain, celebrated at the end of October. In the poem they lift off dramatically, migrating and moving on, inspiring us by their beauty but always, ultimately, out of reach.
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
Living life more fully
Many people think that meditation is something strange or esoteric, demanding a special kind of person.
But as Jon Kabat Zinn reminds us in the previous post, it is simply paying attention to all the details of life. This allows us live more deeply our life as it actually is, and enjoy each moment more fully.
Meditation is not something apart from life. When you are driving a car or sitting in a bus, when you are chatting aimlessly, when you are walking by yourself in a wood or watching a butterfly being carried along by the wind—to be choicelessly aware of all that, is part of meditation.
J. Krisnamurti
Balancing interior and exterior
We are all looking to balance our lives. The key dimension is not really the work-life balance but more balancing our inner and our outer lives. Mindfulness practice focuses on developing our inner life – our clear seeing of who we are and what is going on in our lives each moment. Balancing these worlds – our being with our doing, our need for solitude and our need for connection, our energies that lead us outside ourselves and those which touch into our self-awareness and purpose – is what leads to real peace.
It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world.
If we become addicted to the externals our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of your inner world. This wholesomeness is natural; to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you.
John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
Mindfulbalance 