Invisible kindness

Every two weeks,  or so,  I facilitate a Support Group for the Hospice volunteers, listening as they share their experiences of being with people towards the end of their life. Each time I am struck by the kind presence which they offer to those who are ill.  After the last meeting it struck me again how being generous requires an ongoing leap of faith, as we often cannot see the effects of our presence or our words. It maybe these  invisible kindnesses, which we offer quietly and without knowing their effect,  are the greatest things we can do in our lives.

In the human world, abundance does not happen automatically. It is created when we have the sense to choose community, to come together to celebrate and share our common story. Whether the ‘scarce resource’ is money or love or power or words, the true law of life is that we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around.

Parker Palmer

Sunday Quote: Loving whatever is in the way

 

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

Still the mind in order to love

The eternal moment is outside of time, is not a part of our past or our future, and yet it is lived amidst all our everyday activities. It is in the eternal moment that love is born. Love does not belong to time, and its timeless quality is well known to all lovers. The lover has to learn to still the mind in order to catch the moment and stay true to love’s unfolding. Wayfarers tread a path that leads from illusions of time to the eternal moment that belongs to the soul.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Le, Signs of God

Our fear of opening up

There is a secret about human love that is commonly overlooked: Receiving it is much more scary and threatening than giving it. How many times in your life have you been unable to let in someone’s love or even pushed it away? Much as we proclaim the wish to be truly loved, we are often afraid of that, and so find it difficult to open to love or let it all the way in.

John Welwood

Protection schemes

It’s important to recognize that all the emotional and psychological wounding we carry with us from the past is relational in nature: It has to do with not feeling fully loved. And it happened in our earliest relationships — with our caretakers — when our brain and body were totally soft and impressionable. As a result, the ego’s relational patterns have largely developed as protection schemes to insulate us from the vulnerable openness that love entails. In relationship the ego acts as a survival mechanism for getting needs met while fending off the threat of being hurt, manipulated, controlled, rejected, or abandoned in ways we were as a child. This is normal and totally understandable. Yet if it’s the main tenor of a relationship, it keeps us locked into complex strategies of defensiveness and control that undermine the possibility of deeper connection. Thus to gain greater access to the gold of our nature in relationship, a certain alchemy is required: the refining of our conditioned defensive patterns.

John Welwood, Intimate Relationship as a Spiritual Crucible 

To love the reality of what happens today

Over and over again I see – in myself and in others – the capacity to turn things that do not actually exist – possible events in the future – into real,  vivid,  scenarios and tangible fears in the present. A huge amount of our anxiety comes from what is not, what “may happen”.  The big challenge is to stay with what actually is, not what the mind convinces us could possibly be. Here,  two quotations,  from completely different traditions,  encourage us in this regard today.

Every particle of creation sings its own song of what is and what is not. Hearing what is can make you wise.  Hearing what is not can drive you mad.

Ghalib, Sufi Poet and mystic, 1797 – 1869

The big thing for me is to love reality and not live in the imagination, not live in what could have been or what should have been or what can be, and somewhere, to love reality and then discover that God is present.

Jean Vanier, Founder of the L’Arche Communities