Tag: Life

Becoming a silent watcher.

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Be present as the watcher of your mind  –  of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations.  Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react.  Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future.  Don’t judge or analyze what you observe.  Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction.  Don’t make a personal problem out of them.  You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.

Eckhart Tolle

Home

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When you rest in God, you just go home to yourself like the wave on the water. If the wave continues to search, she will never find the water. The only way to find the water is to go home to herself. When she realizes that she is water, she has peace. She practices resting in God in the here and the now. Although she continues to rise and fall, she is peaceful. We can practice Love as the ground of our being: Home.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Sunday Quote: Loving whatever is in the way

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The best chance to be whole

is to love whatever gets in the way,

until it ceases to be an obstacle.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

A mix of strength and weakness

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Our lives are a mystery of growth from weakness to weakness, from the weakness of the little baby to the weakness of the aged. Throughout our lives we are prone to fatigue, sickness and accidents. Weakness is at the heart of each one of us. Weakness becomes a place of chaos and confusion, if in our weakness we are not wanted; it becomes a place of peace and joy, if we are accepted, listened to, appreciated and loved.

Some people are infuriated by weakness. Weakness awakens hardness and anger in them. But to deny weakness as part of life is to deny death, because weakness speaks to us of the ultimate powerlessness, of death itself.  To be small, to be sick, to be dying, are stages of powerless, they appear to us to be anti-life and so we deny them.  If we deny our weakness and the reality of death, if we want to be powerful and strong always, we deny part of our being, we live an illusion. To be human is to accept who we are, this mixture of strength and weakness. 

Jean Vanier,  Becoming Human

Open to Ambiguity

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The test of a psychologically mature person, and therefore spiritually mature, will be found in his or her capacity to handle what one might call the Triple A’s: anxiety, ambiguity and ambivalence. While all of us suffer these onslaughts and react reflexively, the immature psyche especially suffers a tension and seeks to resolve it quickly by a shift right or left to a one-sided solution. The more mature psyche is able to sustain the tension of opposites and contain conflict longer, thereby allowing the development and revelatory potential of the issue to emerge. Anxiety rises in the face of uncertainty, open-endedness. Ambiguity confounds the ego’s lust for security, to fix the world in a permanently knowable place. Ambivalence – the fact that the opposites are always present, visible or not  – obliges one to deal with the capacity for dialogue with that other.

James Hollis, Creating a Life.

Storms often lead to growth

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There can be bad weather and winds outside and similar storms and movement  in our inner life. It is good to see them in a similar way:  simply as stuff “passing through”. Sometimes, however, they can shake us out of our habitual patterns and bring us back to what is important.

When changewinds swirl through our lives, they often call us to undertake a new passage of the spiritual journey: that of confronting the lost and counterfeit places within us and releasing our deeper, innermost self – our true selves. They call us to come home to ourselves, to become who we really are.

Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits