Tag: love

Sunday Quote

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Try it today:

One kind word can warm three winter months

Japanese Proverb

Little acts of kindness

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Life is so difficult, how can we be anything but kind?
Sylvia Boornstein, Happiness is an Inside Job

Each day there are innumerable moments when we have the possibility to be kind or helpful to one another. We can choose not to. However, it seems to me that much of life is made up of innumerable little occasions like this.

We can wait around to do something big with our life. Or we can do the little things that are presented each day.

The purpose of human life, why we survive, why we live, is to  give happiness to [others]. Even if we cannot do everything now,  just to stop one problem of another person is worthwhile.
Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche

Passing away

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November is traditionally the month for remembering those who have passed away. It is a practice in harmony with this time of year, as the days shorten and the cold of winter approaches. There seems to be a broad antropological basis for this awareness,  as it can be found in the Celtic calendar around this time also.  Keeping an awareness of the impermanence of all things is one of the basic practices in most of the wisdom traditions. One of the reasons that we struggle is that we give things more solidity than we should, including the problems and worries which pass through the mind as thoughts or emotions. I think the most important lesson learned in sitting meditation is that nothing stays the same for long, including the activity of the mind. Learning the truth of that in a real, felt way,  leads to equanimity. Trying to hold onto things that are changing, even good things, pinning our happiness onto things being exactly as they were, leads us to be less present with how things actually are. However, I do not find this practice easy or something I realize in a once-off manner. I would love if enlightenment came that way. However, for me it is a slow-learned knowledge, that I am working with day-to-day. Looking out on the mountains around my house this morning gently teaches me. The trees let go of their leaves, the mountain allows the mist to descend and rise. I too try to let go, not trying to make this or that moment last forever.

In the deepest forms of insight we see that things change so quickly that we can’t hold onto anything, and eventually the mind lets go of clinging.

Letting go brings equanimity. The greater the letting go, the deeper the equanimity. In practice we work to expand the range of life experiences in which we are free.

U Pandita

Not getting stuck in the past

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Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on ….. their children than the unlived life of the parent. Carl Jung

I had a conversation today which made me reflect on the way that parental patterns have a huge influence on us even as adults. This notion has been around for a long time. In the Old Testament it was believed that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children. This was at times interpreted somewhat simplistically as a a way of explaining inherited illnesses or chance misfortune. However, in another sense it seems to accord with what can be found in modern psychology.

Some of the behaviours which we see in adult life are in response to unconscious traces left by experiences had in childhood. In general these experiences we have when little  frame us into certain judgements about the world. We come to see it as either predictable, stable and nurturing or uncertain and precarious. Our parents also had their own emotional and relationship patterns and ways of dealing with anxiety, and frequently played these out in their relationship to each other, impacting upon us as children. From this we drew our conclusions as to how to deal with the world, and how to develop our own relationships. This parental wound – or the places where our parents got stuck – has a huge influence on our own inner life. The inner world we form as a child will replicate what we see in the outer world and then as an adult we can gravitate towards situations that replicate this inner world dynamic.

We tend to do this by repeating the pattern or by being determined to do the opposite. However, because the opposite behaviour is undertaken in response to the parents’ way of behaving, we are still defining ourselves by it and end up strengthening the dynamic rather than weakening it. A lot of adult neurosis or anxiety can be understood as a part of the self looking to discover its full development away from the narrow confines of the family of origin. A repeating way of doing things or a rigid personal style is a clue to the original place of lack or neglect. Our minds love habits, even when they hurt us.

It is a slow work to recognize the limited nature of the early strategies which we have incorporated into our personality and begin the work of healing by no longer acting on them.

Telling the truth of our soul to ourselves is the first task. Living that truth is the second task. And telling it to other is the third. Such truth-telling will be the supreme test of our lives.

James Hollis

When Beauty brightens

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A poem I have posted before, remembering those who have gone before us.

Though we need to weep your loss,
You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,
Where no storm or might or pain can reach you.

We look towards each other no longer
From the old distance of our names;
Now you dwell inside the rhythm of breath,
As close to us as we are to ourselves.

Though we cannot see you with outward eyes,
We know our soul’s gaze is upon your face,
Smiling back at us from within everything
To which we bring our best refinement.

Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Beside us when beauty brightens,
When kindness glows
And music echoes eternal tones.

When orchids brighten the earth,
Darkest winter has turned to spring;
May this dark grief flower with hope
In every heart that loves you.

May you continue to inspire us:

To enter each day with a generous heart.
To serve the call of courage and love
Until we see your beautiful face again
In that land where there is no more separation,
Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,
And where we will never lose you again.

John O’Donohue

Remembering on All Souls Day

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Today is All Souls Day, the traditional day for remembering those dear to us who have died. It is still celebrated as an important day in the Latin countries, such as Italy, where cemeteries are covered in flowers as families take time to visit and remember. Sadness on occasions such as this is related to love, when we cannot be with someone who is dear to us. This day reminds us that taking a moment  for consciously remembering loved ones who have passed is an important inner practice in our lives.

All I know from my own experience is that the more loss we feel the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means that we had something worth grieving for. The ones I’m sorry for are the ones that go through life not knowing what grief is.

Frank O’Connor

On love, on grief, on every human thing,
Time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing.

Walter Savage Landor