Tag: Meditation

Bringing unity to the parts of our lives

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It is through the activities of our outer life that we grow in our inner life. All of us look to be coherent and not fragmented in our relations with the world. We strive to find the role in life that nourishes the sources deep inside us, makes us feel complete, and where we can be our true selves. Unfortunately, many people can underdevelop their talents and potential, or even deny parts of themselves out of fear of what others may think. Sometimes we need to be daring and believe. Our life’s mission is to bring all the key aspects of our being into our daily life or else we will not be fulfilled. We know when that happens because we feel alive, and real energy begins to flow. The question comes down to what we want to create with our lives.

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that?
We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves.
We must believe that we are gifted for something
and that this thing must be attained.

Marie Curie

Things fall apart

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Not everything goes smoothly everyday or in our life history. However, it seems to be a fact that painful situations have the capacity to help us reflect better than pleasant occasions when everything is going smoothly and positively. Indeed, our quest for an easy life without change is a mistaken one, as change is inevitable, even on a daily level. Wisdom comes when we begin to see that our full growth can include holding the painful aspects of our lives in awareness and not pushing them away, as our natural instinct sometimes demands. It is not only pleasant insights that lead to growth. To grow whole we have to go beneath the surface of neat appearance and enter deeply into our hearts and our history.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Pema Chodron

We will always have some contradictions within

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Sometimes we labour under the mistaken belief that happiness can only come if there are absolutely no difficulties or when everything is resolved in our life or our life history. However, we sometimes need to recognize and simply accept the different parts of our lives and the different directions we want to take, and allow that perfect integration is unlikely to be ever achieved fully in this life. We can hold these different parts and accept the different feelings that exist within us,  as we are, without demanding that they all harmonize. As the writer Mark Epstein put it so well in his excellent book,  we can be “in pieces, without falling apart”

Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysing to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them  and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which makes them trivial by comparison.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

Reach out today

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You often say “I would give, but only to the deserving” . The trees in the orchard say not so, nor the flocks in the pastures. They give that they may live,  for to withhold is to perish.

Kahlil Gibran

Developing a constancy in awareness

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It is true there is an ebb and flow

but the sea remains the sea.

Vincent van Gogh

Where you are, and not judging it

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The path is something we cultivate. We have to know where we are and not try to become something that we think we would like to be; we have to practise with the way it is now, without making a judgement about it. If you’re feeling tense, nervous, disillusioned, disappointed about yourself or whatever, then try to recognise that what is in the moment is enough. Be willing to just admit, to acknowledge the way it is,  rather than to indulge in believing that what you’re feeling is somehow an accurate description of reality, or to feel that what you are feeling is wrong and you shouldn’t be feeling like that. Those are two extremes. But the cultivation of the way is to recognise that whatever is subject to arising is subject to ceasing. And this isn’t a put-down or cold-hearted way of cultivating the path, even though it might sound like it.

Ajahn Sumedho