Tag: Mindfulness

A path

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Heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life. Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a child lost before their time. But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.

Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is a deeper introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something or someone who has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the last letting go.

David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

A reminder about love: Will not run out

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Freud thought that each person possessed a fixed stock of affection. So if you love someone else you love yourself less.  Freud’s wrong. Love doesn’t run out. It’s the miracle of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. The more we love another person, the more we love ourselves, and everything else, and the world. 

Anna Kamienska, A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook

Heartened, disheartened…

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Once out of our particular bondage, self-made or otherwise, the long pilgrimage of spiritual work demands a commitment to wander into a life of authenticity and truth. Once awake, the journey of our promise is always near and challenging. At the same time, the journey of our bondage is still near and disheartening. This is our crooked path to enlightenment: two steps forward, one step back; two days of being heartened, one day of being disheartened. This is the dynamic of being alive. This is what we work with and for.   

Mark Nepo, The One Life We’re Given

The tone and quality of your life

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When you take the time to draw on your listening-imagination, you will begin to hear this gentle voice at the heart of your life. It is deeper and surer than all the other voices of disappointment, unease, self-criticism and bleakness. All holiness is about learning to hear the voice of your own soul. To enter into the gentleness of your own soul changes the tone and quality of your life. Your life is no longer consumed by hunger for the next event, experience or achievement. You learn to come down from the treadmill and walk on the earth.  You no longer squander yourself on things and situations that deplete your essence. You know now that your true source is not outside you. Your soul is your true source and a new energy and passion awakens in you.

John O’Donoghue, Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

Sunday Quote: Roots

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A reflective life means hitting the pause button from time to time. Today marks the start of Holy Week in the Western tradition, the most important week in terms of giving meaning to life.

Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 

By three methods we may learn wisdom:

First, by reflection, which is noblest;

Second, by imitation, which is easiest;

and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Confucius, born 551 B.C.

Holding life lightly

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One should say before sleeping,

“I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved had sat upon my knees and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved.

Everything that has been shall be again.”

W.B. Yeats