Tag: love

Love and fear

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Happiness, anxiety, joy, resentment — we have many words for the many emotions we experience in our lifetimes. But deep down, there are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt.

We have to make a decision to be in one place or the other. If you don’t actively choose love, you will find yourself in a place of either fear or one of its component feelings.

Every moment offers the choice to choose one or the other. And we must continually make these choices, especially in difficult circumstances when our commitment to love, instead of fear, is challenged.

Elizabeth Kubler Ross

The garden of love

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The garden of
Love is green without limit, and yields many fruits other than sorrow
and joy.

Love is beyond either condition:
without spring,
without autumn,
it is always fresh.

Rumi

Keeping our heart limitless

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There are days when we have experiences which make us feel that it is better to close our hearts. However, all the great wisdom traditions encourage us towards a softening of the heart, toward a warm opening to others, even when that seems to be dangerous. As humans, a huge portion of our energy each day is spent dealing with anxiety and the fear of losing safety. These can arise suddenly and take all our attention, encouraging us to close, to become cool, to harden around ourselves. In Buddhism, one antidote to this is to cultivate an opening toward others in “Metta” or Loving-kindness practice. Metta has the connotations of “spreading” or “expanding”. It is radiant. It reaches out. It is an active friendliness  in interpersonal relationships which we cultivate. It works against the fears which  make our lives narrow and dark, and the tendency to dualistically split our lives into “me” and “them”

As a mother at the  risk of her own life protect her child, her only child, even so should one cultivate a limitless heart with regard to all beings. So with a heart of boundless friendliness  should one cherish all living beings; radiating kindness over the entire world.

The Buddha, Sutta Nipata I, 8 b – The Metta Sutta.

Remember the beauty and strength within your heart

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Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness….

The bud stands for all things,
even those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow of the flower, and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely, until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.

Galway Kinnell, Saint Francis and the Sow.

The cure for sadness

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I know a cure for sadness:

Let your hands touch something that

makes your eyes smile.

I bet there are a hundred objects close by that can do that.

Look at beauty’s gift to us –

her power is so great she enlivens

the earth, the sky, our soul.

Mirabai

How nature heals

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These beautiful autumn days touch the heart and the spirit. Simply being out in nature can heal and restore us, without the need for words or explanations or ideas.

We can learn from it as to how to be with someone who is going through a time of difficulty:

I was sad one day and went for a walk; I sat in a field.

A rabbit noticed my sadness and came near

It often does not take more than that to help at times –

to just be close to creatures who are so full of knowing

so full of love, that they don’t

chat

they just gaze with their marvellous understanding.

John of the Cross