Tag: Present moment

To return

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That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb with fatigue, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.

Mark Nepo, Hearing the Cries of the World

Not our fault

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It’s a relief to know that pain comes with life

so that we can stop judging ourselves when it arises

Vidyamala Burch

Sunday Quote: speed

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The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Isaac Asimov

autumn lessons – trust

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Nature does not hurry

yet everything is accomplished

Lao Tzu

In your own back yard

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The great lesson from the true mystics, from the zen monks, from the humanistic and transpersonal psychologists, is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s own back yard. This lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.

Abraham Maslow, 1908 – 1970, American psychologist

Compensatory programs

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Beginning in infancy (or even before) each of us, in response to perceived threats to our well-being, develops a false self: a set of protective behaviors driven at root by a sense of need and lack. The essence of the false self is driven, addictive energy, consisting of tremendous emotional investment in compensatory “emotional programs for happiness.” 

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening