Tag: Life

The tone and quality of your life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

When you take the time to draw on your listening-imagination, you will begin to hear this gentle voice at the heart of your life. It is deeper and surer than all the other voices of disappointment, unease, self-criticism and bleakness. All holiness is about learning to hear the voice of your own soul. To enter into the gentleness of your own soul changes the tone and quality of your life. Your life is no longer consumed by hunger for the next event, experience or achievement. You learn to come down from the treadmill and walk on the earth.  You no longer squander yourself on things and situations that deplete your essence. You know now that your true source is not outside you. Your soul is your true source and a new energy and passion awakens in you.

John O’Donoghue, Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

Sunday Quote: Roots

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A reflective life means hitting the pause button from time to time. Today marks the start of Holy Week in the Western tradition, the most important week in terms of giving meaning to life.

Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 

By three methods we may learn wisdom:

First, by reflection, which is noblest;

Second, by imitation, which is easiest;

and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Confucius, born 551 B.C.

Holding life lightly

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One should say before sleeping,

“I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved had sat upon my knees and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved.

Everything that has been shall be again.”

W.B. Yeats

New life

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Letting go of all the theories from the past frees us to go with how it is actually unfolding

Throw away the light, the definitions,

and say of what you see in the dark

Wallace Stevens

Our view for the day

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Meditation is the natural process of becoming familiar with an object by repeatedly placing our minds upon it. Whatever we’re doing, we always have a view; we’re always placing our mind on one object or another. For example, when we get up in the morning and we’re anxious about something, anxiety becomes our view for the day: “What about me? When will I get what I want?” The object of our meditation is “me.”
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Fresh

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Today is the Spring Equinox – from the Latin “equal night”, when there is equal light and dark in our day –   marking the beginning of Spring for countries in the Northern Hemisphere.

We, the older ones,
Call it Spring,
And we have been through it
Many times.

But there is still nothing
Like the children bringing home
Such happiness
In their small hands.

Mary Oliver, Children, It’s Spring