Tag: Joy

Seeing the secret

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Another writer, Eugene O?Neill, describing a moment – when he looked up at the stars in the night sky – when he saw something as if for the first time. Although difficult, we try to bring some of this quality to each encounter and each moment, not meeting them through the filters of our conditioning, fears or preconceived notions:

For a moment I lost myself – actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the…high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life..  – to Life itself!   To God, if you want to put it that way…. For a second you see the secret – and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning!

Eugene O’Neill, Long Days Journey into Night

Having two hearts, and a choice

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The early Church Fathers had a simple way of expressing our struggle. They taught that each of us has two hearts, two souls:

In each person, they affirmed, there is a small, petty heart, a pusilla anima. This is the heart that we operate out of when we are not at our best. This is the heart within which we feel our wounds and our distance from others. This is the heart within which are chronically irritated and angry, the heart within which we feel the unfairness of life, the heart within which we sense others as a threat, the heart within which we feel envy and bitterness, and the heart within which greed, lust, and selfishness break through. This too is the heart that wants to set itself apart from and above others.

But the Church Fathers taught that inside of each of us there was also another heart, a magna anima, a huge, deep, big, generous, and noble heart. This is the heart we operate out of when we are at our best. This is the heart within which we feel empathy and compassion. This is the heart within which we are enflamed with noble ideals.  Inside each of us, sadly often buried under suffocating wounds that keep if far from the surface, lies the heart of a saint, bursting to get out.

Not everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named correctly. Nowhere is this more important than in how we name both the size and the struggles of the human heart. We are not petty souls who occasionally do noble things. We are rather noble souls who, sadly, occasionally do petty things.

Ron Rolheiser, The Size of our Hearts

The body needs a song, a soul….

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Have posted this poem before, but I saw this bird – the American Northern Cardinal – for the first time last week. Although, unlike Mary Oliver, I did not hear it sing, its bright colour still taught something about life, the heart, and the relationship between the body and the mind .

And this was my true task, to be the
music of the body.
Do you understand? for truly the body needs a song, a spirit, a soul.
And no less, to make this work,
the soul has need of a body,
and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable beauty of heaven where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes,
and this is why I have been sent,
to teach this to your heart.

Mary Oliver,  Red Bird

Developing self-compassion

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Be gentle with yourself. Be kind to yourself.

You may not be perfect, but you are all you’ve got to work with.

The process of becoming who you will be begins first with the total acceptance of who you are.

Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English

Our ongoing relationship with fear

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Fear is our first, and if we are not careful, our last love. It is our most enduring relationship. It never leaves our side. It tells us where to go, what to wear, what to say and what not to say. We surrender all other options to it. Before,  after and during most of our relationships we are concerned above all not with the other party but with what we fear he or she will do…. We are unavailable for any truly loving and fulfilling relationship so long as we are in a committed relationship with the most controlling part of our own mind – our fear. Our fear of what will happen and our fear of what will not.

Nearly everything we are afraid will happen is going to happen anyway, so what’s to fear? There is no secure or underlying ground, so we make ourselves safe only when we see and accept the way life is. Utterly spontaneous and impermanent. When it is time to laugh, we laugh. When it is time to weep, we weep. We are cheated of nothing in life except that from which we withhold ourselves by ego’s narrow bounds. These bounds were meant to break; indeed they must, if we ever hope to be whole again

Karen Maezen Miller, Hand Wash Cold: Care instructions for an ordinary life.

The link between letting go and happiness

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We believe that it is difficult to let go, but in truth, it is much more difficult and painful to hold and protect.  Reflect upon anything in your life that you grasp hold of – an opinion, a historical resentment, an ambition, or an unfulfilled fantasy.  Sense the tightness, fear, and defensiveness that surrounds the grasping.  It is a painful, anxious experience of unhappiness.  We do not let go in order to make ourselves impoverished or bereft. We let go in order to discover happiness and peace.

Christine Feldman