Tag: Life

Distinguishing our fears from reality

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Eventually, we all need to be willing to face the deepest, darkest beliefs we have about ourselves. Only in this way can we come to know that they are only beliefs, and not the truth about who we are. By entering into this process willingly, by seeing through the fiction of who we believe ourselves to be, we can connect with our true nature. As Nietzsche put it, ‘One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.’  Love is the dancing star, the fruit of saying yes, of consciously and willingly facing our fears.

Ezra Bayda, Awake in the World

A slow process

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For most of us, freedom from emotional suffering unfolds more gradually. You might find yourself moving through many rounds of getting lost in the old stories of what is wrong with you, wrong with others, wrong with your life – and then remembering to arrive once again in mindful presence. Yet with each round, the understanding that you are not the isolated, deficient, endangered self depicted in your stories deepens; and with each round the realization of your true potential — awakened, loving presence — blossoms more fully.

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

A day of rest

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Silence is a very perilous part of life. It tells us what we are obsessing about. It reminds us of what we have not resolved within ourselves. It shows to us the underside of ourselves, from which there is no escape, which no amount of cosmetics can hide, that no amount of money or titles or power can possibly cure. Silence leaves us with only ourselves for company. Silence is, in other words, life’s greatest teacher.

Joan Chittister, Illuminated Life

Sunday Quote: Opening towards

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You learn about a thing … by opening yourself wholeheartedly to it.

You learn about a thing by loving it.                                       

Barbara McClintock,  Nobel prize-winning geneticist

Nourishing your basic goodness

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Dogen defined practice as giving life to your original self. This is not giving life to your deluded self, which we do all the time, but to your original self, your basic goodness, … which each one of us intrinsically possesses whether we realize it or not. This is the word practice. It can be understood in a very oceanic way or in a very shallow way, but still practice is always practice, and its truth is to ignite and reveal your true self within your everyday life.

J Kwong ,  No beginning, No End. The intimate heart of Zen.

To name is to tame

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Tiger-forest v3Whatever is newly born needs a name and when we are more and more  welcomed by the silence, naming becomes our job . We have to notice, to bless with attention the beasts before us, both the rough and the smooth. To name is to bring an attitude of wonder to the work of sorting, and even to the work of dealing with difficult states of mind. When we can name what is happening to us, we are no longer fully identified with it and have begun to separate from the grasping dark. If what we feel is known and named to be a tiger, then the whole world is not tiger. We can divide the compulsion and the image, the action and the emotion. There is a landscape through which we move, trees casting their own stripes on the forest floor, places where tiger is not.

John Tarrant, The Light inside the Dark