If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live.
If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.
Thomas Merton, Love and Living
What’s our focus
Tag: Mindfulness
Complaint
Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. It’s the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid.
Pema Chodron
Our relationship to what is
No matter how much we like or dislike, or are hurt or maimed by a thought, action or event, our attitudes do not colour the event itself, only our relationship to it.
As this is so, no matter how much we stomp or shout or cajole or whine, reality is what it is. In this is sacredness and dignity.
Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi, Cutting the Cat Into One: the Practice of the Bodhisattva Precepts
The strength to survive
In the light of all that is happening this year and this week, we all need to keep our hopes alive
There is an Ethiopian legend about a shepherd boy Alemayu that speaks to me of the power of hope. Alemayu had to spend the night on a bitterly cold mountain. He had only a very thin cloth to wear. To the amazement of all the villagers, he returned alive and well. When they asked him how he survived, he replied: ” ‘The night was bitter. When all the sky was dark, I thought I would die. Then far, far off I saw a shepherd’s fire on another mountain. I kept my eyes on the red glow in the distance, and I dreamed of being warm. And that is how I had the strength to survive.
Each one of us has a “shepherd’s fire on another mountain” that has kept our hope alive. This fire has given us the courage to recover our lost self and believe in the dreams that stir in our soul.
Joyce Rupp, Dear Heart, Come Home
We are lost
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Wendell Berry
Choice
You will either step forward into growth,
or you will step back into safety.
Maslow
