Tag: Mindfulness

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Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Belonging is related to longing.  If you hyphenate belonging, it yields a lovely axiom for spiritual growth:  Be – Your – Longing.  Longing is a precious instinct in the soul. Where you belong should always be worthy of your dignity. You should belong first in your own interiority.  If you belong there, and if you are in rhythm with yourself and connected to that deep, unique source within, then you will never be vulnerable when your outside belonging is qualified, relativized, or taken away.  You will still be able to stand on your own ground, the ground of your soul, where you are not a tenant, where you are at home.

John O’Donohue,  Anamchara

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Not avoiding

Karl Duffy2 Comments
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To see myself and my life as they truly are is joy. 
After all the struggle and avoiding and denying and going the other way,
 it is deeply satisfying for a second to be there with life as it is. 
The satisfaction is the very core of ourselves.
 Who we are is beyond words –
 just that open power of life,  manifesting constantly in all sorts of interesting things,
 even in our own misery and struggles. 
The hassle is both horrendous and wholesome.
Charlotte Joko Beck.

The wrens nest

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Wrens 
make their nests of fancy threads 
and string ends, animals 
abandon all their money each year. 
What is it that men and women leave? 
Harder than wren’s doing, they have 
to abandon their longing for the perfect. 
The inner nest not made by instinct 
will never be quite round, 
and each has to enter the nest 
made by the other imperfect bird.
Robert Bly, from Eating the Honey of Words
photo sylvain haye

Dissolving fear

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We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if we could only arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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Staying fluid

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seaWhen you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine many things with a confused body and mind, you might suppose that your mind and nature are fixed. However, if you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that there is nothing at all that has an unchanging self.

Dogen

Sunday Quote: Step by step

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Learning to walk...step by step.jpg

If the path before you is clear,

you’re probably on someone else’s

Joseph Campbell

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