Tag: Spirituality

At home with oneself

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Solitude is one of the most precious things in the human spirit. It is different from loneliness. When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation. Solitude can be a homecoming to your own deepest belonging. One of the lovely things about us as individuals is the incommensurable in us. In each person, there is a point of absolute non-connection with everything else and with everyone. This is fascinating and frightening. It means that we cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for the things we need from within. The blessings for which we hunger are not to be found in other places or people. These gifts can only be given to you by yourself. They are at home in the hearth of your soul. . . . In everyone’s inner solitude there is that bright and warm hearth.

John O Donohue

Sunday Quote: Being quiet

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Silence is God’s first language;

Everything else is a poor translation.

In order to hear that language, we must learn to be still.

Thomas Keating, Cistercian Monk and writer on Centering Prayer

The Bigger Picture

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Often we do not know what is really going on. Our perspective can barely accommodate another person’s point of view, no less the forward march of evolution or the eternal mind of God.

Better to admit not knowing and to relax in the mystery of life than to try to force our minds where they can’t go.

Elizabeth Lesser

A pilgrimage to our own life

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Since everything is sacred, staying close to what is sacred is a matter of presence and attention more than travel to some secret place. In essence, staying close is a pilgrimage to the heart of where we are. Since it is we who lose our directness of living, our task is often to restore that freshness of being alive….How do we stray on and off the path of what matters? How do we befriend the life of obstacles? How do we find a home between suffering and loving the world? How do help each other respond to the invitation to grow?

Mark Nepo

Sunday Quote: When we do not appreciate what we have

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You cannot avoid paradise.

You can only avoid seeing it.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Not reducing ourselves to our worries

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Like most of the great spiritual masters of our universe, Jesus taught from the conviction that we human beings are victims of a tragic case of mistaken identity. The person I normally take myself to be –  that busy, anxious little ‘I’ so preoccupied with its goals, fears, desires, and issues — is never even remotely the whole of who I am, and to seek the fulfillment of my life at this level means to miss out on the bigger life. This is why, according to his teaching, the one who tries to keep his ‘life’ (i.e., the small one) will lose it, and the one who is willing to lose it will find the real thing.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening