Tag: Joy

Gratitude as a choice

Karl Duffy2 Comments

two doors

Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. It is amazing how many occasions present themselves in which I can choose gratitude instead of a complaint. I can choose to grateful when I am criticized, even when my heart still responds in bitterness. I can choose to speak about goodness and beauty, even when my inner eye still looks for someone to accuse or something to call ugly.

Henri Nouwen

Seeing life freshly

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child

It’s a Bank Holiday, or long weekend,  here in Ireland, so one immediately feels as if there is more time to slow down and take a break from the rushing which the working week inevitably impresses on the mind. A certain space enters, allowing us to see things more lightly, or to see them with eyes that have the room to appreciate them:

Childhood is not a state which only applies to the first phase of our lives in the biological sense.

Rather it is a basic condition which is always appropriate to a life that is lived aright. 

Karl Rahner, Catholic Theologian, 1904 – , 1984

Letting time be

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File:Old pine tree.jpg

Once in a while
I just let time wear on,
leaning against a
solitary pine
standing speechless…
as does the whole universe!
Ah, who can share
this solitude with me?

Ryokan (1758 – 1831)

 

Not aiming

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The Second ArrowDon’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.

Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run — in the long-run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Be Happy

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File:Abends am Meer.jpg

One of my meditation teachers used to end each of our interviews … and say to me, “Remember, Sylvia, be happy.”  I actually for a long time thought it was a salutation, like “have a good day” or something that you say just in a routine kind of a way, and it took me a long time to realize that it was an instruction, “Be happy.” Not only that it was an instruction but that it was a wisdom transmission –  that happiness was a possibility. I understand that happiness to mean,  the happiness of a mind that’s alert, that’s awake to the amazing potential of being a person in a life, with a mind that’s opened, that sees everything that’s going on, and realizes what an amazing possibility this is, and with a heart that’s open, the heart that responds naturally as hearts do, in compassion, in connection with friendliness, with love, with consolation when it needs to:  That that’s the happiness of life –  a mind that’s awake, a heart that’s engaged.

Sylvia Boorstein, Stanford Keynote Speech, 2005

photo joe sarembe

How we grow

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Rose bud.jpg

How did the rose

ever open his heart

and give to this world all its beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light

against its being,

otherwise, we will remain too frightened

Hafiz

photo Amada44