Tag: Present moment

This moment is enough

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Contentment doesn’t mean we are always happy about life events or deny the reality of pain. We cultivate contentment by cultivating the inner witness who is able to respond to life from a place of calmness, peace, and tranquility. It means we honor that what is given to us in any moment is enough. So it is the ‘still heart’ — the heart of equanimity — that can welcome everything in. Instead of always living with a sense of dissatisfaction about our lives, or anticipation over what comes next, we live in the knowledge that this moment contains everything we need to be at peace, to experience freedom, to develop compassion for ourselves and others. 

Christine Valters Paintner, Lectio Divina: The Sacred Art

Magnificence in every moment

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When you become enlightened it can come about through a very small or ordinary thing. You see, the most difficult thing for someone to accept is the plainness of their life. To discover magnificence in every moment of a simple life is truly life’s greatest reward.

Hua-Ching Ni, Entering the Tao

Sunday Quote: The right moment

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One of the early Fathers said that ‘there is no such thing as delay with the Holy Spirit.’

This means that everything happens at the right moment.

Laurence Freeman, Common Ground: Letters to a World Community of Meditators

Original giftedness

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We arrive in this world with birthright gifts — then we spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting others disabuse us of them. As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability; under social pressures like racism and sexism our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others….We are disabused of original giftedness in the first half of our lives. Then — if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our loss — we spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed.

Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

Not in control

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To be immersed in mystery can be very distressing at first, but over time I have found immense relief in it. It takes the pressure off. I no longer have to worry myself to death about what I did right or wrong to cause a good or bad experience- because there is no way of knowing. One of the biggest lessons is the realization that I’m not as much in control of life as I’d like to be. This is not an easy learning, especially for take-charge people like me, people who think they can- and, more important, should- be in control of things. Mysterious as it may be, there is something wonderful at the heart of our existence, and it is about nothing other than love: love for God, love for one another, love for creation, love for life itself.

Gerald May

Pay close attention

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If the doors of perception were cleansed

then everything would appear to man as it is,

Infinite.

William Blake