Tag: Meditation

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

Being kind

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Appreciative words are the most powerful force for good on the earth. George W. Crane

Most of us would not consider ourselves to be deliberately unkind. However, it is probably true that we miss many occasions each day to be more kind.  We ourselves can probably remember occasions when we were hurt by others not doing something – not listening, not noticing when we did something, not being there when we needed them. Being kind does not always mean having to give beyond our strength. The Buddha spoke of making  “offerings that cost nothing“, such as  a compassionate eye, a smiling face, and loving words. So let us do the simple things, such as being present, or acknowledging what was done or saying words that are within our capacity to say, knowing that our heartfelt words can make such a difference in peoples lives.

Kindness in words creates confidence,

Kindness in thinking creates profoundness

Kindness in giving creates love.

Lao Tzu

We are asked to love

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Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business.

What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.

Thomas Merton

Halloween demons and monsters

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A similar post with a halloween theme, on how to work with the fears which our mind creates. It suggests that the best way to work with our fears involves turning towards and holding them in non-judgmental awareness, rather than fighting or running away:

Normally we empower our demons by believing that they are real and strong in themselves and have the power to destroy us…. [But]…demons are ultimately part of the mind and, as such, have no independent existence.

Nonetheless we engage with them as though they were real, and we believe in their existence – ask anyone who has fought post-traumatic stress, or addiction, or anxiety. The mind perceives demons as real, so we get up caught up in battling with them. Usually this habit of fighting against our perceived problems gives demons strength, rather than weakening them. In the end all demons are rooted in our tendency to create polarization. By understanding how to work with this tendency  – to try and dominate the perceived enemy and to see things as either/or – we free ourselves from demons by eliminating them at their very source.

Tsultrim Allione, Feeding your Demons: Ancient Wisdon for Resolving Inner Conflict

Sunday Quote: Dragons

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Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.

Rilke

Things to do this weekend

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Modern culture keeps sending all these messages that the people who know how to live properly are always doing something.

The great question “What are you doing this weekend?” keeps coming up, as if that defines us. We hear talk about lives where everything is “so busy that I do not have time to think”, or “I am so busy I never have time for myself”, or “I am so busy I am exhausted”, and this word, busy, busy, busy comes up time and again, and it starts to sound like an epidemic –  an epidemic of busyness.

Abbot Christopher Jameson, The Big Silence, BBC2