The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.
The …thing in the cave, that was so dreaded, has become the center.
Joseph Campbell.
photo EMeczKa
Tag: inspiration
The roots of compassion
Easter Saturday.. a day of waiting
When I stop running from what frightens me, and instead try to feel and understand it, I learn to deal with the world with greater kindness.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness
photo AMISOM Public Information
The modern temptation: Letting work define us
For Christians this evening begins three days of reflection, the most significant part of the yearly calendar.
Often people devote their primary attention to the facts of their lives, to their situation, to their work, to their status. Most of their energy goes into doing. Meister Echhart writes beautifully about this temptation. He says many people wonder where they should be and what they should do, when in fact they should be more concerned about how to be. The love side of your life is the place of greatest tenderness within you. In a culture preoccupied with fixities and definites and correspondingly impatient mystery, it is difficult to step out from the transparency of false light into the more candlelit world of the soul.
John O’Donohue
photo: echiner1
Our only teacher
Each Moment
life as it is
the only teacher.
Zen Center of San Diego, Practice Principles
photo tobosha
Learning to be open
I sit before flowers
hoping they will train me in the art
of opening up
Shane Koyczan, 22 May 1976, Canadian poet and writer
photo katrina wiese
Being kind to ourselves – even the difficult bits
Face the shadow side of yourself, but do not identify with it. It represents only part of who you are. So there is a difference between relating to the denied parts of yourself (bringing light to them), and totally “acting them out” (which is to leave them in their unconscious and dark state). This is why it is so foundational to know yourself, and to learn to be honest about your real motivations.
The hero in us wants to attack, fix, or deny the existence of our dark side. We can also be tempted to share dramatically everything about it as a way to control it (sometimes called ventilating or dumping). The saint merely weeps over the shadow and forgives it — and by God’s grace forgives himself for being a mere human. He opens his arms to that which has been in exile and welcomes it home for the friend that it often is.
Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation: Daily Meditations for Men
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