Never be so focused on what you’re looking for
that you overlook the thing you actually find.
Ann Patchett, American author
Tag: Mindfulness
Half Circles
These last few months I have come to see more and more how some sense of longing seems to be a part and parcel of human nature, and will never go away. It comes from the fact, as John O’Donohue wrote in Anam Chara, that the human person is a “threshold where many infinities meet”. This can explain why, for many of us, a sense of wonder can exist in a world which is finite:
The human being is an in-between presence, belonging neither fully to the earth from which she has come, nor to the heavens toward which her mind and spirit aim….The creator of the universe loves circles: time and space are circles, the day is a circle, the year is a circle, the earth is a circle. But when creating and fashioning the human heart, the creator only created a half-circle, so that there is something ontologically unfinished in human nature. That is why you can’t enter your own life or inhabit your full presence without a vital and real relationship with some other person.
John O Donohue, The Presence of Compassion
photo hedera baltica
When busyness distracts
Become aware of impatience as it arises during the day. Be aware of the signals in the body (tapping fingers) and the talk in the mind (“Hurry up!”) that accompany impatience. Ask yourself, “Why am I in a rush? What do I want to rush ahead to get to?” See what answers arise.
Jan Chozen Bays, How to train a Wild Elephant
photo david pickersgill
In the assumed, not in the now
It’s in the abstract, the assumed, the possible and ‘what others think’ that the mind holds its phobias – as life messages of abandonment or inadequacy … Those qualities aren’t there in specific direct experience: there’s painful and pleasant moments, but there are no life messages. However our daily world is commonly held in terms of non-specific generalizations, like its ‘another Monday,’ or, ‘a typical man’, or ,‘I dread meeting Janice, she’s always like this,’ or ‘I’m hopeless.’ In fact…. any sense of a lasting entity or state of being is an act of generalization. It’s a useful convention, but one that allows the mind’s neuroses and corruptions to be projected onto the here and now.
Ajahn Sucitto, The Low Point
Sunday Quote: Looking in the wrong places
How far I have to go to find you
in whom I have already arrived
Thomas Merton
photo mtaylor848
Becoming still
In the stillness of the quiet, if we listen,
we can hear the whisper of the heart
giving strength to weakness,
courage to fear,
hope to despair.
Howard Thurman, American Author, pastor and civil rights leader
photo bananenfalter
