Tag: Spirituality

Its not in the future, but here today

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Mindfulness encourages us to pay attention and rest in what is happening in the present moment.  However, we often prefer to be elsewhere, or that the present moment be other than what it actually is. What we learn through our practice is the key to finding contentment is to be fully present with whatever we are doing, no matter how ordinary. This realization that the fulness of our lives is right in front of us, and not to be found in the future, is an insight found in all wisdom traditions and leads to true contentment .

The everyday tedium of our lives is the desert we wander, looking for the Promised Land. Our relationships, our work, and all the little necessary tasks we don’t want to do are all the gift. We have to brush our teeth, we have to buy groceries. we have to do the laundry, we have to balance our checkbook. This tedium — this wandering in the desert — is in fact the face of God. Our struggles, the partner who drives us crazy, the report we don’t want to write — these are the Promised Land.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Sunday Quote: Where we grow

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Life acquires meaning when we face the conflict

Between our desires and reality

365 Tao

Things fall apart

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Not everything goes smoothly everyday or in our life history. However, it seems to be a fact that painful situations have the capacity to help us reflect better than pleasant occasions when everything is going smoothly and positively. Indeed, our quest for an easy life without change is a mistaken one, as change is inevitable, even on a daily level. Wisdom comes when we begin to see that our full growth can include holding the painful aspects of our lives in awareness and not pushing them away, as our natural instinct sometimes demands. It is not only pleasant insights that lead to growth. To grow whole we have to go beneath the surface of neat appearance and enter deeply into our hearts and our history.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Pema Chodron

Ending confusion: How to find the meaning in life

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Separated by centuries and traditions,  but the same message:

The meaning of life is to see

Hui Neng ( Chinese Zen monk, 7th century).

The whole of life lies in the verb “seeing”

Teilhard de Chardin, (Jesuit priest, 20th Century).

Devotion proceeds through various stages of unmasking until we reach the point of seeing the world directly and simply without imposing our fabrications.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Confusion: Seeking outside for what can only come from within

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The confused heart, having lost joy within itself, seeks…..consolation outside.

The more it seeks exterior goods, the more it lacks the interior joy to which it can return

Hugh Feiss, osb

Opening to the soul in ordinary life

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The three days of the Easter Festival contain a number of beautiful rituals  which have been celebrated  by human beings for thousands of years. These rituals  touch of the big themes of human life –  loss and death, betrayal and loyalty, meaning and love –  and do so in a way that  allow us ways to share significant emotions with others. The city of Geneva was quiet this morning, as it has been the last  few days.  It is good to have seasons and rhythms in our lives, periods of less activity with time to celebrate with family and friends.  These celebrations  can become familiar rituals in our lives – they bring us together and allow us to connect, and through connection find support and meaning. They open us up to something which is beyond the rush of each day and the limitations of work:

Ritual maintains the world’s holiness. Knowing that everything we do, no matter how simple, has a halo of imagination around it and can serve the soul enriches life and makes the things around us more precious, more worthy of our protection and care. As in a dream a small object may assume a significant meaning, so in a life that is animated with ritual there are no insignificant things. When traditional cultures carve elaborate faces and bodies on their chairs and tools, they are acknowledging the soul in ordinary things, as well as the fact that simple work is also ritual. When we stamp out our mass-made products with functionality blazoned on them but no sign of imagination, we are denying ritual a role in ordinary affairs. We are chasing away the soul that could animate our lives.

Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul