Meditation

MEDITATION

DID I?
Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love?
These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here and the life to come.
~ Henri Nouwen

FORGIVENESS
We experience forgiveness, but the impact or “karma” of our mistakes remains, and we must still go back and repair the bonds we’ve broken. Otherwise, others may not be able to forgive us, nor will we likely forgive ourselves. “Amazing grace” is not a way to avoid honest human relationships. Rather, it’s a way to redo them—but now, gracefully—for the liberation of both sides. Nothing just goes away in the spiritual world; all must be reconciled and accounted for.

LIFE WILL BREAK YOU

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
— Louise Erdrich
The Painted Drum

JUNE

Clearly, June is the time for being in the world in new ways, for throwing off the cold and dark spots of life. Life is physically easier now and spiritually pregnant with possibility. Warmth becomes a way of life that makes us open to new people and new experiences; flowers confront us with our responsibility for beauty.
June is the month that calls us out of our houses, out of ourselves, to become one with nature. It sweeps us up into the noise of life, into the warmth of life, into the community of life. Sit on your doorstep; take an aimless walk down the street; plant a small flower in a small pot. Be a tribute to creation. Be a part of the chorus of life.
Or try saying this silently to everyone and everything you see for thirty days and see what happens to your own soul; “I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future.” If we said it to the sky, we would have to stop polluting; if we said it when we see the ponds and lakes and stream, we would have to stop using them as garbage dumps and sewers; if we said it to small children we would have to stop abusing them, even in the name of training; if we said it to people, we would have to stop stoking the fires of enmity around us. Beauty and human warmth would take root in us like a clear, hot June day. We would change.

LOVE

It is love that fashions us into the fullness of our being – not outlook, not our work, not our wants, not our achievements, not our parents, not our status, not our dreams. These are all the fodder and filler, the navigating fuels of our lives; but it is love: who we love, how we love, why we love, and that we love, which ultimately shapes us.
It is love, before all, and after all, in the beginning, and in the end, that creates us. Today, remembering this, let yourself acknowledge and remember the moments, events, and the people who bring you, even momentarily, into a true experience of love, and allow the rest, the inescapable mundanities of life, like a cloud to very quietly drift away.
Treasure those relationships, honor and nurture them. Never take them for granted. They are gifts you have been given. They will be gone one day. The measure of our happiness depends on the quality of these relationships. We are as happy as our relationships are loving.
~Daphne Rose Kingma

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF YOGA 6/21/24

https://www.un.org/en/observances/yoga-day

MAY SADNESS BE THE MEASURE OF YOUR WISDOM

I heard of a father who never hugged his daughter goodbye without saying this blessing over her: "May every place you go make it hard for you to leave... May every person you love make it hard for you to say goodbye."
No doubt about it. Loss comes in many forms.
We choose some losses, yes, but others are making choices, too. Their decisions affect us, too. So, is life nothing more than an adult game of pickup sticks––tossed into the air helter-skelter for us to pick our way through with resignation or be felled by despair?
Not really. The Spirit of Life in us is simply richer, broader, more perceptive than we are. It takes a bevy of lost choices, it takes some experience, to come to understand that. Every choice we make for ourselves in life leaves unnoticed a number of choices we would have made. One choice cancels out another. The choice we did not make represents a number of capabilities we have that this particular choice will not cultivate, a number of opportunities available that call the rest of me out of my protective shell in order to enable me to become the more of me.
The pain of one loss is always an invitation to open myself to the rest of life, to the rest of myself, to the rest of this great wide world I carry within me. Choice is still mine––only the situation has changed.
Life lies in adapting to choices that are not mine. It requires that I understand that life is not final until it ends. The space between then and now depends on choice, yes, but what I would choose to do and what is available to do are not both under my control. It is a matter of realizing that the clay of life is the clay in which I find myself. Life is not a clay I create; it is the clay that I have before me at this moment to use.
It is the choice I make when unlimited choice is not an option that determines both what I do and what I am. It identifies not only what is in me but what I intend to become. Everything I choose is not the best choice I could have made, perhaps, but the way I deal with it is the choice that will define me in the end.
No, no single segment of life is final. None of them can be cast in stone. Each of them for some reason somewhere. But as long as everything I and everyone with whom I share my soul represents something that when it was over I did not want to leave, I will have finally known happiness.
Those are the choices we want to make in life. Those will be the ones that really count. Choose wisely. May sadness be the measure of your wisdom as you go.
~Joan Chittister

PEACE

Every moment of social tension needs a peacemaker. Otherwise, how can the human family get beyond the competition, domination, annihilation, and blind struggles for power that pass as defense even now? The fact is that only one thing can bring peace: not to destroy other people’s sense of self, of dignity, of value in the name of truth.
~Joan Chittister

COMPASSION

To pay attention in a way that leads to freedom requires the attention to be loving. If it doesn’t have love in it, attention becomes cold or distant or potentially judging. When we bring a quality of loving awareness we can be both present for the mystery of life and be received in a field of compassion and love. The greatest thing you can do for another being is to revive that unconditional love that comes
in making contact with them beyond all the changing conditions which is pure consciousness. Everything transforms when we identify with being the loving awareness to the story instead of the actor. In India there is a description of what it means to be seen in that way. It is called “the glance of mercy.” The glance of mercy is the ability to look at someone with eyes of so much understanding and love that they are seen beyond all the drama of their life, beyond their mistakes and successes- to see ones essence beyond all that. To see the secret beauty in another is the ground of every relationship. And also to be able to behold oneself in that same way.

A SECRET PLACE

There is a secret place. A radiant sanctuary.
This magnificent refuge is inside you.
Put away the incense and forget the incantations they taught you. Ask no permission from the authorities. Slip away. Close your eyes and follow your breath to the still place that leads to the invisible path that leads you home.
Be brave and walk through the country of your own wild heart. Be gentle and know that you know nothing. Be mindful and remember that every moment can be a prayer. Praising God. Losing your temper and your dignity with someone you love, Balancing ecstasy with clear thinking, self-control with self-abandon. Be still. Listen. Keep walking.
Believe the incredible truth that the Beloved has chosen for his dwelling place the core of your own being because that is the single most beautiful place in all of creation. Waste no time. Enter the center of your soul.

Adapted from The Interior Castle by St Teresa of Avila

GRATITUDE AND JOY

Buddhist monks begin each day with a chant of gratitude for the blessings of their life. Native American elders begin each ceremony with grateful prayers to mother earth and father sky, to the four directions, to the animal, plant, and mineral brothers and sisters who share our earth and support our life. In Tibet, the monks and nuns even offer prayers of gratitude for the suffering they have been given: “Grant that I might have enough suffering to awaken in the deepest possible compassion and wisdom.”
The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.
Gratitude is a gracious acknowledgment of all that sustains us, a bow to our blessings, great and small, an appreciation of the moments of good fortune that sustain our life every day. We have so much to be grateful for.
Gratitude is confidence in life itself. It is not sentimental, not jealous, nor judgmental. Gratitude does not envy or compare. Gratitude receives in wonder the myriad offerings of the rain and the earth, the care that supports every single life.
As gratitude grows it gives rise to joy. We experience the courage to rejoice in our own good fortune and in the good fortune of others.
Joy is natural to an open heart. In it, we are not afraid of pleasure. We do not mistakenly believe it is disloyal to the suffering of the world to honor the happiness we have been given.
Like gratitude, joy gladdens the heart. We can be joyful for people we love, for moments of goodness, for sunlight and trees, and for the breath within our breast. And as our joy grows we finally discover a happiness without cause. Like an innocent child who does not have to do anything to be happy, we can rejoice in life itself, in being alive.
Let yourself sit quietly and at ease. Allow your body to be relaxed and open, your breath natural, your heart easy. Begin the practice of gratitude by feeling how year after year you have cared for your own life. Now let yourself begin to acknowledge all that has supported you in this care:
With gratitude I remember the people, animals, plants, insects, creatures of the sky and sea, air and water, fire and earth, all whose joyful exertion blesses my life every day.
With gratitude I remember the care and labor of a thousand generations of elders and ancestors who came before me.
I offer my gratitude for the safety and well-being I have been given.
I offer my gratitude for the blessing of this earth I have been given.
I offer my gratitude for the measure of health I have been given.
I offer my gratitude for the family and friends I have been given.
I offer my gratitude for the community I have been given.
I offer my gratitude for the teachings and lessons I have been given.
I offer my gratitude for the life I have been given.
Just as we are grateful for our blessings, so we can be grateful for the blessings of others.
Continue to breathe gently. Bring to mind someone you care about, someone it is easy to rejoice for. Picture them and feel the natural joy you have for their well-being, for their happiness and success. With each breath, offer them your grateful, heartfelt wishes:
May you be joyful.
May your happiness increase.
May you not be separated from great happiness.
May your good fortune and the causes for your joy and happiness increase.
Sense the sympathetic joy and caring in each phrase. When you feel some degree of natural gratitude for the happiness of this loved one, extend this practice to another person you care about. Recite the same simple phrases that express your heart’s intention.
Then gradually open the meditation to include neutral people, difficult people, and even enemies- until you extend sympathetic joy to all beings everywhere, young and old, near and far.

WHERE LOVE HAS LIVED

A home is not simply a building; it is the shelter around the intimacy of a life. Coming in from the outside world and its rasp of force and usage, you relax and allow yourself to be who you are. The inner walls of a home are threaded with the textures of one's soul, a subtle weave of presences. If you could see your home through the lens of the soul, you would be surprised at the beauty concealed in the memory your home holds. When you enter some homes, you sense how the memories have seeped to the surface, infusing the aura of the place and deepening the tone of its presence. Where love has lived, a house still holds the warmth. Even the poorest home feels like a nest if love and tenderness dwell there.
~John O'Donohue

THE TEMPLE OF HEALING

We all need healing at different times in our lives. Sometimes we need healing for physical illness. At other times, we need to heal the traumas that we’ve suffered and find ways to release the difficulties of the past we carry in our bodies. We need release from the struggles and emotions brought about by our conflicts and the pain we experience from the follies of humanity.
To heal we cannot reject our illness and grief or use anger and aversion to try to get rid of them. Instead, we have to bring a tender, healing energy to all that is sick or torn, what is broken or lost. In the Buddhist prayer of healing, similar to the spirit of Jesus, we recite: “May I be the healing medicine for all who are sick. May I bring healing to myself and others.” We believe that healing is possible and dedicate ourselves to be part of that healing. We become tender and wise with ourselves and those around us, especially when we are experiencing fear and grief ourselves.
Sometimes this is all that healing asks, that we become present. You should never underestimate your power to heal when you step toward difficulty with courage and love, when you touch pain with healing rather than fear. Our healing comes with our own kind attention and through the kind embrace of another. As long as you can, find a passion for the preciousness of life, and bring this care to the healing of your heart and body.
~Jack Kornfield

LISTEN TO YOUR HEART

You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it's better to listen to what it has to say.
~Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

WISDOM

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura Naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and of joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being...
~Thomas Merton

TO LOVE

What does it mean to love a person or another living thing? It means recognizing its true nature and accepting its value and sacredness. It means consciously causing no harm and actively making reparation when harm has inadvertently been done. It means empathizing with it, sharing its joy, pain, sorrow, and recognizing its needs. It means leaving it alone to grow through its own cycles and contributing what it can to its well-being.
To love, in the sense, is to respect, honor, and nurture. We recognize the beauty in those we love, and appreciate their contributions to our lives and well-being. They are not ours to own, use, or abuse, but rather are gifts, we are privileged to know. Loving ourselves, and other living things in this way, can heal us all.

NEW YEAR BLESSINGS

The year ends and we begin a new circuit around our own beautiful sun star, twirling amidst the galaxies.
Take a breath, quiet your heart and listen deeply.
There is so much coming and going, and yet…feel how underneath it all is a vast silence
and a spaciousness that holds everything in its balance.
In human incarnation there are inevitable periods of difficulty, personal and collective. Yet with wisdom and a good heart, our personal sufferings can temper us and help us live with dignity and find an indestructible spirit in ourselves. And in the same way, we can learn to bear the difficulties of the world with compassion and courageously do what we can to mend the broken places.Yet difficulties are never the end of the story. There is always a return of the light.There is always grass that pushes itself through the cracks in the sidewalk. You are this life force constantly being reborn every morning at breakfast. And while the news often features the worst of humanity, there are a billion acts of human kindness every hour of every day.
Take another breath and sense this truth.
A most trustworthy and blessed project is to align yourself with compassion, to plant seeds of goodness, to use the creative force of your life to bring understanding, awakening and love to all. Foster trust in life's renewal power.
Pablo Neruda explains further,
“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.”
Renewal is happening. Take quiet time to listen to your heart, to meditate and to rest amidst the great turnings.
Feel the renewal of spring that can be born in you. Align yourself with goodness.
Let yourself blossom like a lotus or whatever unique flower you are, shining in the world, offering tiny seeds of love amidst it all.
~Jack Kornfield

THE SOUL FELT ITS WORTH

O holy night the stars are brightly shining
It is the night of our dear Savior's birth
Long lay the world in sin and error pining
Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth

Meister Eckhart, the 16th century mystic and theologian, in typical mystical fashion, is credited with saying, “We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.” I think helping other souls to feel their worth is the very way we all birth God into the world each and every day. It is through our actions, through helping other people feel worthy, embraced, and loved, that we can each make the divine present.
How would our world be transformed if the gift we gave our loved ones, and even our not-so-loved ones, the gift of worthiness? What if we all focused on helping others to see themselves the way God sees them - as beloved treasures?
Have you ever been in the presence of a person who made you feel transformed, worthy, and deserving of love and admiration?
The lyrics of “O Holy Night” says in a world of sin and error, He came and people finally knew how it felt to be valued and loved.
My hope for each of you this Christmas season and beyond is not only that you feel the worth of your own soul, but that you help others do the same. You are so worthy; you are so loved. May you always feel worthy, blessed, and loved and may your presence help others to feel the same. Merry Christmas.

INTRODUCTION TO CANDLELIGHT YOGA

The world is offering countless blessings in every moment. You can use tonight’s practice to open you to the riches of the world, to calm your fears, to satisfy the hungers of your heart, to break out of your own isolation and to heal whatever is damaged, or limited or wounded within you and to ask for a complete healing of anything and everything that is blemished within you.
The ultimate goal of all yoga practice is Divine Union. That all we think, do, say and live be in Divine Presence.
The Divine comes to you so that you might have life and have it to the full.
As John O’Donahue said: There's no need for you to feel judged, afraid or sinful. But you should feel happy and celebrate your belonging to the Great Presence. Because at the depths of yourself you're as pure as the dew on the spring grass, you're as bright as the dawn rising over the mountain, you are as youthful and energetic as the well rising in the field and you are as rhythmic as the antiphon of the waves breaking gently and faithfully on the shore. You are in yourself just where you need to be, your are whole and you are complete. You are at home in your inner world and there is no need to be afraid.

AWAKENING SELF COMPASSION

We are so quick to judge one another. And just as we are hard on others we are even harder on ourselves. With mindfulness, our natural compassion grows. We can see that we are all carrying our own burden of tears. You and everyone you meet are sharing in some measure of the pain present on the planet. You are called upon to witness this pain—in yourself and others—with compassion. But how can we do this when we live in a time where it seems we have lost contact with the power of mercy and compassion, when we have closed off to the suffering of ourselves and others?
We have to begin to sense the tears for ourselves before we can cry for others. These tears are actually a great gift. They are the same moisture that brings new life out of the dry earth every spring. For the Lakota Sioux, grief is considered a great gift because they believe the gods are closest to us when we are suffering. When a Lakota Sioux has suffered a great loss and is grieving, he or she is considered wacan, or “most holy.” Their prayers are believed to be especially powerful, and others will often ask one who grieves to pray on their behalf.
This doesn’t mean that compassion will be easy, especially when you’ve been betrayed or you’ve suffered some irreplaceable loss. As the Sufis pray, “Overcome any bitterness that may have come because I am not up to the magnitude of the pain that has been entrusted to me.”
You may want to heal, but still find yourself slipping back into old habits of anger and resentment. This can be the most frustrating. After struggling for half a century with the British Empire, Mahatma Gandhi said that his most formidable opponent was not the British Empire or the Indian people, but a man named Mohandas K. Gandhi. “With him I seem to have very little influence.”
But it is necessary to learn that you are worthy of being loved. Buddha put it quite simply: “You can search the whole tenfold universe and not find a single being more worthy of love and compassion than the one seated here—yourself.” Self-compassion and self-forgiveness are not weaknesses, but the roots of our courage and magnanimity. Sometimes compassion for ourselves and others seems hard to find. But even if you lose touch with these feelings during your most intense suffering, compassion is an essential part of our true nature. In fact, it is in this self-compassion and self-love that you find the strength to carry a lamp through your darkest nights. And it is by first practicing self-compassion that you find not only a way to hold your own struggles and sorrows in your heart—but through them you learn how to connect with the sufferings and sorrows of all those around.
This self-compassion helps us all survive. It causes us to jump out of the way of an unexpected fast car as we enter the street. We treasure our life. Self-compassion struggles to keep us alive even in situations of complete abandonment and abuse.
As you go through your difficulties, you can learn to bring a quality of loving care to everything you touch. You will find that love and care have an extraordinary capacity to transform the sorrows of your life into a great stream of compassion.
Be gentle with yourself—it should not be a struggle. Know your limitations. Extend your compassion only as far as you feel your heart opening naturally. Plant your seed of trust. It will grow in its season.
As you face loss, frustration, hurt, and conflict, invite a sense of your own dignity. Sit up, stand up tall. Have respect for yourself, and patience and compassion. With these, you can handle anything.

SAINT ISAAC OF NORWICH
Be at peace with your own soul, then heaven and earth will be at peace with you. Enter eagerly into the treasure house that is within you, you will see the things that are in heaven; for there is but one single entry to them both. The ladder that leads to the Kingdom is hidden within your soul….. Dive into yourself, and in your soul, you will discover the stairs by which to ascend.

THANKSGIVING by Richard Rohr

When we receive everything as a gift, we can live gratefully, allowing the energies of life and love to flow through us to the benefit of the whole.Only a pre-existent attitude of gratitude, a deliberate choice of love over fear, a desire to be positive instead of negative, will allow us to live in peace. It is important that we ask, seek, and knock to keep ourselves in right relationship with Life Itself. Life is a gift, totally given to us without cost, every day of it, and every part of it. A daily and chosen attitude of gratitude will keep our hands open to expect that life, allow that life, and receive that life at ever-deeper levels of satisfaction—but never to think we deserve it. Those who live with such open and humble hands receive life’s “gifts, full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over into their lap”
In my experience, if we are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes its place. All the truly great persons I have ever met are characterized by what I would call radical humility and gratitude. They are deeply convinced that they are drawing from another source; they are instruments. Their genius is not their own; it is borrowed. We are moons, not suns, except in our ability to pass on the light. Our life is not our own; yet, at some level, enlightened people know that their life has been given to them as a sacred trust. They live in gratitude and confidence, and they try to let the flow continue through them. They know that “love is repaid by love alone,” as both St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thérèse of Lisieux have said. In the end, it is not our own doing, or grace would not be grace. It is God’s gift, not a reward for work well done. We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus. All we can do is be what God’s Spirit makes us to be, and be thankful to God for the riches God has bestowed on us. Humility, gratitude, and loving service to others are probably the most appropriate responses we can make.

CREDO by Walt Whitman

Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

WHAT IS YOGA? ~ Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Alistair Shearer

Yoga is a way to restore our lost wholeness, our integrity as complete human beings, by unifying the personality around a center that is silent, unbounded, spacious, and joyful.
The techniques of yoga are methods of purifying the nervous system so that it can reflect a greater degree of consciousness and our lives can become an increasingly positive force in the world.
If these techniques are correctly practiced, the whole nervous system is revitalized – the body enjoys better health and more energy, the rested mind is freed from the burden of past experience, and perception is restored to its primal freshness. Thought and activity become coherent and integrated, life becomes richer and more fulfilling.
Yoga is not a religion. Its techniques, however, will gradually lead you to the direct experience of those truths on which religion rests. Yoga is a catalyst that allows us to grow in whichever direction is natural and life supporting.

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST WAR
Ram Lev (Leonard Perlmutter)

“Without question, the recent Middle East karma all the world is dealing with is challenging to the individual personality. But as Yoga Scientists, we can go to school on this karma that appears to be so painful—everywhere, for everyone, simultaneously. The Israeli – Hamas War is an integral aspect of the time in which we live. This is a season of fear, anger, selfishness, disintegration and regeneration of forms, and it can only be manifested through ignorance. War is always a capitulation to the treacherous anarchy of untrained minds, but when minds are trained to lovingly coordinate their four functions, both external and internal wars give way to skillful and rewarding solutions. And as students of Yoga Science, each of us, in our own individual lives, has the tools and access to the “higher” knowledge of unerring Super Conscious Wisdom to bring Light to a world increasingly covered by darkness.

Now, at this auspicious moment, you and I are being asked to be the Light in every relationship that comes to us. My relationships and your relationships are NOT insignificant! They are NOT without profound meaning. Each new relationship we have is Divinely ordained because these personal karmas Perfectly serve our individual and collective needs and abilities. These karmas are our shared dharma––the work we are asked to do in the world to repair the torn fabric of the human race. Time doesn’t exist. Space doesn’t exist. There is no “here,” and there is no “there.” Everything is happening in the NOW. So in every moment, regardless of the relationship Providence has sent, if you allow the Light within you, that IS you, to come through you, it will diminish the darkness of ignorance and add to the Light of wisdom—here, there and everywhere.

It’s a marvelous and auspicious opportunity. It’s a blessing! But in every situation and relationship we must ask ourselves: “On which side will we fight––Darkness or Light?” To comfort, prepare, and inspire Arjuna in a similar challenge thousands of years ago, Krishna promises in the Bhagavad Gita, “Make every action an offering to Me—even your suffering—and I, the Light, will shine forth through you.”

I urge you to experiment with this understanding, as I am doing, and just see where it leads us all.

God bless you. God bless you. God bless you.

RECEIVING THIS LIFE IN AWARENESS

MY CHILDHOOD
''When I was four years old, my mother used to bring me a cookie every time she came home from the market. I always went to the front yard and took my time eating it, sometimes half an hour or forty-five minutes for one cookie. I would take a small bite and look up at the sky. Then I would touch the dog with my feet and take another small bite. I just enjoyed being there, with the sky, the earth, the bamboo thickets, the cat, the dog, the flowers. I was able to do that because I did not have much to worry about. I did not think of the future, I did not regret the past. I was entirely in the present moment, with my cookie, the dog, the bamboo thickets, the cat, and everything.

Maybe you have the impression that you have lost the cookie of your childhood, but I am sure it is still there, somewhere in your heart. Everything is still there, and if you really want it, you can find it. The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.''
-`Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step

REMEMBERING OUR KINSHIP
Over and over again, poets, mystics and yogis describe an experience of a deeply felt embodied connection to God and the world around us. Rediscovering our kinship with this “family of things” is the telos of this particular spiritual journey that these poets describe and a holistic answer to the alienation many of us have felt from our own faith. To all of you - no matter what or who caused you to lose heart, consider this poem by e.e. cummings:

i thank You God
for most this amazing day:
for the leaping greenly spirit
of trees and a blue true dream of sky;
and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birthday of life and of love and wings: and of the gay great happening illimitably earth).
how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any–lifted from the no of all nothing–human merely being, doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

May the transforming power of gratitude for everyone and everything sent your way fill your heart today. Happy Easter!

RICHARD ROHR MEDITATION

PABLO NERUDA
Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us.

SO I COULD FIND MY WAY

SAMADHI
The Pali/Sanskrit word samādhi, which is usually translated as “concentration,” is made up of three parts, a verbal root and two prefixes (sam+ā+dhi). The last part, dhi, is a noun form derived from the verbal root dhā, meaning “to put or place.” The prefix ā gives direction and suggests “placing upon,” and the prefix sam means “gathering or bringing together.” When combined and used in a Buddhist context, these elements add up to the sense of “unifying the mind and placing its awareness upon a particular object.”Traditional sources also emphasize that the mind focuses on a single (eka) point (agga), and “one-pointedness” (Pali, ekaggatā; Skt. ekāgratā) is another common way of defining samādhi. The mind is actually always focused on a single object in any given moment, but it habitually moves rapidly—and sometimes restlessly and apparently randomly—from one object to another. You may have noticed this!
The practice of developing concentration as a meditative skill begins with intentionally directing the mind to a chosen object, such as the breath, and holding it there steadily over multiple successive mind moments. This is not easy to do at first, as reflex draws our attention to novel and distracting sights, sounds, sensations, or thoughts. Keeping the mind grounded on one thing can seem boring, futile, or frustrating.
With practice, however, the mind wanders off its object of meditation less often, staying away for less time before its meandering is noticed and attention is called back to the breath. The body becomes progressively more relaxed, breathing naturally slows down and gets more subtle, and the mind begins to feel increasingly peaceful, stable, lucid, and capable. With such enhanced focus one can now look more closely at the flowing stream of consciousness, or one can proceed to deeper levels of samādhi.
A tipping point can be reached when the experience of the concentrated mind itself becomes more compelling than the allure of external objects, and a state of absorption known as jhāna gradually develops. The mind becomes tranquil but alert, with neither too much nor too little energy, and finds an equanimous stance that neither favors nor opposes anything but rather rests with quiet confidence on its object. A growing sense of well-being ensues and slowly matures into a state of profound equanimity. The mind in this state is said to be luminous, malleable, cleansed of its impurities, and thus able to see things clearly. Now the process of developing wisdom can begin.

THE SOUL FELT ITS WORTH
“O holy night! The stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
‘Til He appeared and the soul felt its worth.”

One of my favorite quotes is attributed to Mister Eckhart, a 16th century German theologian and mystic. In mystical fashion, he is credited with saying, “We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.”
I think helping other souls to feel their worth is the very way we all birth God into the world each and every day. It is through our actions, through helping other people feel worthy, embraced, and loved, that we can each make the divine present. How would our world be transformed if the gift we gave loved ones, and even our not-so-loved ones, was the gift of love and worthiness? What if we all focused on helping others to see themselves as beloved treasures? That we not focus on their faults and weaknesses but on their goodness and strengths. There’s plenty of sin and error going around but unconditional love is certainly lacking.

Have you ever been in the presence of a person who made someone feel transformed? They felt saved. They felt redeemed. They felt loved. And that is what the lyrics of “O Holy Night” are saying; because when Jesus came, people finally knew what it felt like to be loved. Into a world filled with sin and error, we can bring love, and through that love show souls their worth.

GRATITUDE
Hundreds of years ago in Japan, a Zen master named Sono was known far and wide for her wisdom. Many came to her to find healing for their bodies, their minds, their hearts. But no matter what their pain or affliction, Sono offered one simple remedy: "Every day repeat this mantra: ‘Thank you for everything, I have no complaints whatsoever.’"
As the story goes those who took her advice found peace and healing.

THANKSGIVING
When we receive everything as a gift, we can live gratefully, allowing the energies of life and love to flow through us to the benefit of the whole.Only a pre-existent attitude of gratitude, a deliberate choice of love over fear, a desire to be positive instead of negative, will allow us to live in peace. It is important that we ask, seek, and knock to keep ourselves in right relationship with Life Itself. Life is a gift, totally given to us without cost, every day of it, and every part of it. A daily and chosen attitude of gratitude will keep our hands open to expect that life, allow that life, and receive that life at ever-deeper levels of satisfaction—but never to think we deserve it. Those who live with such open and humble hands receive life’s “gifts, full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over into their lap”
In my experience, if we are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes its place. All the truly great persons I have ever met are characterized by what I would call radical humility and gratitude. They are deeply convinced that they are drawing from another source; they are instruments. Their genius is not their own; it is borrowed. We are moons, not suns, except in our ability to pass on the light. Our life is not our own; yet, at some level, enlightened people know that their life has been given to them as a sacred trust. They live in gratitude and confidence, and they try to let the flow continue through them. They know that “love is repaid by love alone,” it is not our own doing, or grace would not be grace. It is God’s gift, not a reward for work well done. We are God’s work of art, All we can do is be what God’s Spirit makes us to be, and be thankful to God for the riches God has bestowed on us. Humility, gratitude, and loving service to others are probably the most appropriate responses we can make.
Richard Rohr

UNFORGIVENESS / FORGIVENESS
Unforgiveness and forgiveness may be the most critical issues in anyone’s life. Dr. Alex Loyd says that in all the years that he was lecturing and counseling he had never seen a significant health issue where there was not an unforgiveness problem.
Now here’s a secret about unforgiveness: it often hides behind anger, fear, sadness, and other emotions. So if you think you don’t have unforgiveness issues ask yourself, “Who do I feel some anger related to, or sadness, or fear?” You’ll usually find unforgiveness at the bottom of those issues. Unforgiveness issues can also be toward yourself. They can be toward other people. They can be toward God. Or, they can be in reverse of that. They can be feeling like God has not or will not forgive me. Feeling like other people have not forgiven me whether they have or not. Any of those can be the crucial cellular memory that blocks our health or blocks our success. This unforgiveness and the memories that contain this unforgiveness block our healing. They block our success. Why? Because they are destructive memories that are not truth and the are not love. They are lies and selfishness.
It’s interesting too, that the actual word “forgiveness” if you look back to its etymology means to “cut the rope” or “untie the rope.” So unforgiveness means we are literally tied to the thing that we refuse to forgive or to the person. Even if the person intended to hurt us and even if the person is not willing to forgive us, we can cut that rope.
The foundation for an abundant life of love, joy and peace is forgiveness. Healing unforgiveness is absolutely essential for physical, emotional and spiritual healing.

I ASK FOR PEACE

Mpho Tutu van Furth describes a painful miscommunication that took place during South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process:
‘I am sorry. Forgive me’ were the words the perpetrators said. I am taking responsibility for what I did and what was done at my command or in my name. But what the victims heard was not the same. They didn’t hear the words the perpetrators said. They heard the words of the translators instead. ‘Ndicela uxolo.’ But that’s not the same.
The English ‘I am sorry’ wraps the plea in the logic of individuality and the English ‘Forgive me’ underlines the same. What I have done was done only by me and thus is only my responsibility. This ‘I am sorry. Forgive me’ is all about me.
But the old ones heard a different word. ‘Ndicela uxolo’ means ‘I ask for peace.’ It is an ubuntu apology and it is about we. ‘I ask for peace’ sees our interconnectivity.
‘I am sorry. Forgive me’ means set me free of the guilt and the shame that has burdened me. Decide to wipe the debt slate clean for me.
The old ones heard ‘I ask for peace’ and they offered forgiveness as peace based on ubuntu reciprocity. They gave their forgiveness as space to plant the seeds of a better future for the whole community. . . .
Ubuntu peace is peace between us and peace within each of us. Ubuntu forgiveness is peace that heals. . . . When the old ones heard Ndicela uxulo . . . they heard perpetrators asking for hope for a better ‘we’. They heard an appeal for healing for all of us and the space between us that is community. They heard an appeal for a healing of the fabric of life.
Tutu van Furth explains how ubuntu peace moves beyond verbal apologies to sincere action and reparations for past harm:
Without reparations ‘I am sorry. Forgive me’ asks victims to pick up an eraser and walk through the past eradicating the injuries that perpetrators inflicted so that those who wielded the scythe of destruction can be released from the guilt for their cruelty and their greed, their prejudice and violence, while preserving the benefits that their behaviour has bestowed on them and their children. Without reparations forgiveness has no ubuntu, and it heals nothing. . . .
The ubuntu understanding of forgiveness is that forgiveness cultivates justice and bestows peace. . . .
The forgiveness we once offered you would build justice where cruelty had lived. Our forgiveness was born and bred in ubuntu. Later we came to understand and see that forgiveness for you had its home in individuality and could not understand the logic of community. So forgiveness for you was what set you free of all responsibility for us.
But reparations have made a new place for us to gather. Reparations have started to reveal what it takes for all of us to heal and to step into God’s new creation.

KNOW YOUR REFUGES
A refuge is anything that protects, nurtures, or uplifts you. Life can be hard, and everyone has difficult and uncomfortable experiences.We all need refuges. What are your own?
A pet or other people could be a refuge for you. Places can be refuges, such as a favorite coffee shop, or a church, library, or park. Certain things can feel like a refuge, such as a cup of coffee, a cozy sweater, or a good book. You may also find refuge in different activities—- perhaps walking a dog, playing an instrument, or watching a movie.
Some refuges are intangible. Memories of being in nature or a time with a child or a loved one. For some the sense of something sacred is a profound refuge. Ideas can be refuges, like the wisdom of saints and knowing you are loved by someone.
There is the key refuge of having faith in whatever is good inside yourself. This doesn’t mean overlooking the rest. Simply seeing your decency, warmth, kindness, good intentions, capabilities and efforts. These are facts about you and recognizing them is a reliable source of refuge.
Give over to your refuges. Let them live you.

WHAT IS LOVE?
Throughout recorded history, love has burned in the hearts of composers, writers, painters, and playwrights, and smoldered in those of parents, children, and friends. Love, primal, passionate, and pure, has been dissected, revered, praised, and derided. It has been called complex, ethereal, and mysterious. We long for a definition but fear that the feeling called love would be less exhilarating were it defined. Much of the mystery is rooted in the incomprehensibility of love's purpose. Self-sacrifice, procreation, caring, and romance can all exist separate from love. It is possible to have intense feelings for others but not define those feelings as love. And yet love remains a powerful and universal force that uplifts, inspires, and is strong enough to bring about great change.
Like the wind, which we cannot see yet know is all around us, love is often more easily perceived through its effects. As we transcend the boundaries of ego in order to love and be loved, we put aside self-centeredness and experience unity with another, and compassion, peace, joy, excitement, and fulfillment are the inevitable results. It is irrelevant whether the focus is a lover, a child, a relative, or a friend; the results are both familiar and novel, more so when love is returned in kind. But Paramahansa Yogananda noted that "to describe love is very difficult, for the same reason that words cannot fully describe the flavor of an orange. You have to taste the fruit to know its flavor. So with love. Those who have tasted of it often equate love with jealousy, bitterness, resentment, lust, or aggressive attachment, but it is none of these things. Love is both a feeling and an action, for as it brings us into the light, so do we strive for the happiness, safety, health, and fulfillment of those we love.
It is true that love can be fleeting and accepts few controls or conditions. The strongest loves blaze into being and wither away in an instant or last lifetimes. The one constant is the release of emotion. Love is not learned but brought forth from within because the basic nature of the human animal is love. It is only fear that causes the need to love and be loved to be buried. When we accept our worthiness and reject indifference, it is then that we are able to become outlets of love

RELATIONSHIPS
Ultimately, the quality of a person’s relationships dictates the quality of their life. Good relationships aren’t just happier and nicer.
When we know how to heal relationships and keep them strong, they make us resilient. All the clichés about how love makes us
stronger aren’t just clichés; it’s physiology. Connection with people who love and value us is our only safety net in life.
Acknowledging that everyone is doing the best they can in a situation can help to better understand them and forgive them
when they fall short of our expectations.
Healing unhealthy relationships whenever possible brings peace of mind and happiness. Harsh criticism and judgment bring about pain and withdrawal.
Todays meditation asks us to bring to mind a relationship that we need to heal
and to ask for guidance to bring healing. Our physical and emotional health improves
when we let go of resentments, bitterness and hurt.

FIND HEALING
When the mind is festering with trouble or the heart torn, we can find healing among the silence of mountains or fields, or listen to the simple, steadying rhythm of waves. The slowness and stillness gradually takes us over. Our breathing deepens and our hearts calm and our hungers relent. When serenity is restored, new perspectives open to us and difficulty can begin to seem like an invitation to new growth.
This invitation to friendship with nature does of course entail a willingness to be alone out there. Yet this aloneness is anything but lonely. Solitude gradually clarifies the heart until a true tranquility is reached. The irony is that at the heart of that aloneness you feel intimately connected with the world. Indeed, the beauty of nature is often the wisest balm for it gently relieves and releases the caged mind.
~John O'Donohue

MIDSUMMER EVE
For centuries many have known that a bit of Midsummer madness and magic are good for the soul. Tonight is Midsummer Eve. In Europe, Midsummer Eve, June 23, has traditionally been set aside as a night for high spirited merrymaking and lighthearted bewitchment. It’s also the high holy feast of the Stillwater’s, the mock New England sect imagined by author Tasha Tudor’s family and friends. They believe that life’s simple pleasures are meant to be savored and that nature is to be revered.
The Stillwater religion which combines the beliefs of the Shakers, Quakers, and Amish, is a state of mind according to the creator. The Stillwater religion connotes something very peaceful, life without stress. On Midsummer Eve the Stillwaters have a great party with a large bonfire - plenty of music, dancing in the barn and a sumptuous summer supper. Stillwater believers are very hedonistic. Life is to be enjoyed and not saddled with. Their first commandment is “take joy from each day.” This is a catechism we could all embrace.
Tomorrow, Midsummer Day, June 24, is a midcourse correction for the year. Legend has it that anyone who sprinkles her face in the dew of Midsummer day will grow more lovely with each passing year. Fairy cakes are made, and Midsummers syllabub which is a delightful concoction of cider, lemon, berries and whipped cream is prepared for a moonlight picnic where personal dreams are renewed. Love charms, magic herbs, and divination are all a part of the mix.
Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery reveals through her heroine, Anne Shirley, (Anne of Green Gables),
“when Midsummer arrives it’s time to look ahead and dream. Perhaps if one is lucky, the days ahead will unfold a never to be forgotten summer– – one of those summers which seldom come into any life, but leave a rich heritage of beautiful memories in they’re going – – one of those summers in which, a fortunate combination of delightful weather, delightful friends, and delightful doings, come as near to perfection as anything can come to in this world.”
May this potent Midsummer spell never be broken for you and those you love.

LOVING KINDNESS MEDITATION

'MENTORS
Today we recall and remember the courageousness of certain people in our past that led us out of fear and into fearlessness. Throughout everyone’s life, mentors appear – those people who taught us that life is good, and that we are strong. These are memories that feed our soul. These are the memories to keep with us, the stories we should tell ourselves and others.
Meditation is one of the best ways to reconnect with the power within us and, at the same time, to release what no longer serves us. As we go into our meditation today, let us recall those personal heroes who taught us the greatest lessons, and emulate their courage and fearlessness to live today and in the future.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards… - Søren Kierkegaard

THE GREAT TEACHER
The journey of water as it flows upon the earth can be a mirror of our own paths through life. Water begins its residence on earth as it falls from the sky or melts from ice and streams down a mountain into a tributary or stream. In the same way, we come into the world and begin our lives on earth. Like a river that flows within the confines of its banks, we are born with certain defining characteristics that govern our identity. We are born in a specific time and place, within a specific family, and with certain gifts and challenges. Within these parameters, we move through life, encountering many twists, turns, and obstacles along the way just as a river flows.
Water is a great teacher that shows us how to move through the world with grace, ease, determination, and humility. When a river breaks at a waterfall, it gains energy and moves on, as we encounter our own waterfalls, we may fall hard but we always keep moving on. Water can inspire us to not become rigid with fear or cling to what's familiar. Water is brave and does not waste time clinging to its past, but flows onward without looking back. At the same time, when there is a hole to be filled, water does not run away from it in fear of the dark; instead, water humbly and bravely fills the empty space. In the same way, we can face the dark moments of our life rather than run away from them.
Eventually, a river will empty into the sea. Water does not hold back from joining with a larger body, nor does it fear a loss of identity or control. It gracefully and humbly tumbles into the vastness by contributing its energy and merging without resistance. Each time we move beyond our individual egos to become part of something bigger, we can try our best to follow the lead of the river.

THE SECOND AGREEMENT

THE GIFT OF FORGIVENESS

In Egyptian mythology, there is a story that says that when a person dies, the soul travels to a different dimension to undergo a life review. In that timeless, spaceless realm, the god Anubis places the recently deceased’s astral heart on a scale to weigh it against the feather of truth. If the heart is lighter than the feather, then the soul is liberated for eternity. If the heart is heavier than the feather because it is filled with regrets, resentment and remorse, then the soul is sent back for another lifetime of learning and evolution.
This ancient myth offers a powerful message to lighten up - to let go of the emotional burdens that weigh us down, disturb our peace and make it difficult to be fully present. For many of us, one of the biggest emotional burdens we carry is a lack of forgiveness - for others and for ourselves.
When we hold on to a grievance, shame, anger or pain from the past, our entire body and mind suffer. Our body produces excessive amount of hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, which over time can compromise our immune system and contribute to health issues. Hostility is an inflammatory emotion and is linked to autoimmune disorders.
Fortunately, our body and mind are incredibly flexible, and when we let go of the emotional toxicity, our body immediately begins to return to homeostasis, which is a state of self-healing and self-regulation. On an emotional level, the benefits of forgiving and releasing the burden of judgment are valuable beyond compare. In forgiving, we free ourselves from attachments to the past, we clear encumbrances that constrict our heart, expanding our ability to love and be loved.
In yoga practice forgiveness is, in particular, the capacity to let go, to release the suffering, the sorrows, the burdens of the pains and betrayals of the past, and instead to choose the mystery of love. Forgiveness shifts us from the small separate sense of ourselves to a capacity to renew, to let go, to live in love. As the Bhagavad Gita says, “If you want to see the brave, look to those who can return love for hatred. If you want to see the heroic, look to those who can forgive.”
With forgiveness we are unwilling to attack or wish harm on anyone, including ourselves. And without forgiveness, life would be unbearable. It’s hard to imagine a world without forgiveness, because we would be chained to the suffering of the past and have only to repeat it over and over again. There would be no release.
It’s not easy. “Love and forgiveness are not for the faint-hearted,” the sages of yoga teach. . But someone has to stand up and say, “It stops with me. I will not pass this hatred on. Someone has to say, “I will accept the betrayal, the meanness, the rejection, the hurt feelings and the suffering, and I will bare it, and I will not retaliate.”

WHERE LOVE HAS LIVED

A home is not simply a building; it is the shelter around the intimacy of a life. Coming in from the outside world and its rasp of force and usage, you relax and allow yourself to be who you are. The inner walls of a home are threaded with the textures of one's soul, a subtle weave of presences. If you could see your home through the lens of the soul, you would be surprised at the beauty concealed in the memory your home holds. When you enter some homes, you sense how the memories have seeped to the surface, infusing the aura of the place and deepening the tone of its presence. Where love has lived, a house still holds the warmth. Even the poorest home feels like a nest if love and tenderness dwell there.
~John O'Donohue

THERE IS A SECRET PLACE

There is a secret place. A radiant sanctuary.
This magnificent refuge is inside you.
Put away the incense and forget the incantations they taught you.
Ask no permission from the authorities. Slip away.
Close your eyes and follow your breath to the still place that leads to the invisible path that leads you home.
Be brave and walk through the country of your own wild heart.
Be gentle and know that you know nothing.
Be mindful and remember that every moment can be a prayer.
Praising God. Losing your temper and your dignity with someone you love.
Balancing ecstasy with clear thinking, self-control with self-abandon.
Be still. Listen. Keep walking.
Believe the incredible truth that the Beloved has chosen for his dwelling place
the core of your own being because that is the single most beautiful place in all of creation.
Waste no time. Enter the center of your soul.

Adapted from The Interior Castle by St Teresa of Avila

SADNESS

You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad? … Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

Almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more, — is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered.
~Ranier Maria Rilke

SEEING THE GOODNESS IN OURSELVES AND OTHERS

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY

Ananda, the beloved disciple of the Buddha, once asked his teacher about the place of friendship in the spiritual journey. “Master, is friendship half of the spiritual life?” he asked. And the teacher responded, “Nay, Ananda, friendship is the whole of the spiritual life.”
Love is something learned only by the long, hard labor of life. It is sometimes over before we’ve ever known we ever had it. We sometimes destroy it before we appreciate it. We often take it for granted. Every love, whatever happens to it in the long run, teaches us more about ourselves, our needs, our limitations, and our self-centeredness than anything else we can ever experience. As Aldous Huxley wrote: “There isn’t any formula or method. You learn by loving.”
But sometimes, if we’re lucky, we live long enough to grow into it in such a way that we see the face of God in another. In that case, we have loved.
~Joan Chittister

UNDERSTANDING ONENESS

Every thought we have and action we take becomes part of the collective energy of the planet. When we use our energy to bring light into the world, it combines with the light brought by others to dispel the darkness. Though we live in a world of duality, which helps us to experience the material plane, we don't need to experience extremes to understand them. We can share our experiences and understanding with others not from a place of condescension but of connection. When the entire family of humanity understands that each of our thoughts, choices, and actions affect us all, we will share an incredible level of consciousness -- one that puts our oneness above all else and helps us evolve into higher expressions of our spiritual selves. Remember the next time you witness an action of another that they are of the same earth as you but simply on a different conscious level at this point in their life. Find compassion, bless them, and move along your day in grace.

FINDING TIME FOR YOU

We can excel easier in our lives when our own spiritual, physical, and intellectual needs are fulfilled.

Within each of us, there is a well of energy that must be regularly replenished. When we act as if this well is bottomless, scheduling a long list of activities that fit like puzzle pieces into every minute of every day, it becomes depleted and we feel exhausted, disconnected, and weak. Refilling this well is a matter of finding time to focus on, nurture, and care for ourselves, or "you time." Most of us are, at different times throughout the day, a spouse, a friend, a relative, an employee, a parent, or a volunteer, which means that down time, however relaxing in nature, is not necessarily "you time." Though some people will inevitably look upon "you time" as being selfish, it is actually the polar opposite of selfishness. We can only excel where our outer world affairs are concerned when our own spiritual, physical, and intellectual needs are fulfilled.

Recognizing the importance of "you time" is far easier than finding a place for it in an active, multifaceted lifestyle, however. Even if you find a spot for it in your agenda, you may be dismayed to discover that your thoughts continuously stray into worldly territory. To make the most of "you time," give yourself enough time on either side of the block of time you plan to spend on yourself to ensure that you do not feel rushed. Consider how you would like to pass the time, forgetting for the moment your obligations and embracing the notion of renewal. You may discover that you are energized by creative pursuits, guided meditation, relaxing activities during which your mind can wander, or modes of expression such as writing.

Even if you have achieved a functioning work-life balance, you may still be neglecting the most important part of that equation: you. "You time" prepares you for the next round of daily life, whether you are poised to immerse yourself in a professional project or chores around the home. It also affords you a unique opportunity to learn about yourself, your needs, and your tolerances in a concrete way. As unimportant as "you time" can sometimes seem, it truly is crucial to your well-being because it ensures that you are never left without the energy to give of yourself.
~Madyson Taylor

FRIENDSHIP BY DAVID WHYTE

FINDING PEACE WITHIN

If we are to have true peace in the world, we must first find it within ourselves.

Most people agree that a more peaceful world would be an ideal situation for all living creatures. However, we often seem stumped as to how to bring this ideal situation into being. If we are to have true peace in this world, each one of us must find it in ourselves first. If we don't like ourselves, for example, we probably won't like those around us. If we are in a constant state of inner conflict, then we will probably manifest conflict in the world. If we have fighting within our families, there can be no peace in the world. We must shine the light of inquiry on our internal struggles, because this is the only place we can really create change.

When we initiate the process of looking inside ourselves for the meaning of peace, we will begin to understand why it has always been so difficult to come by. This in itself will enable us to be compassionate toward the many people in the world who find themselves caught up in conflicts both personal and universal. We may have an experience of peace that we can call up in ourselves to remind us of what we want to create, but if we are human we will also feel the pull in the opposite direction -- the desire to defend ourselves, to keep what we feel belongs to us, to protect our loved ones and our cherished ideals, and the anger we feel when threatened. This awareness is important because we cannot truly know peace until we understand the many tendencies and passions that threaten our ability to find it. Peace necessarily includes, even as it transcends, all of our primal energy, much of which has been expressed in ways that contradict peace.

Being at peace with ourselves is not about denying or rejecting any part of ourselves. On the contrary, in order to be at peace we must be willing and able to hold ourselves, in all our complexity, in a full embrace that excludes nothing. This is perhaps the most difficult part for many of us, because we want so much to disown the negative aspects of our humanity. Ironically, though, true peace begins with a willingness to take responsibility for our humanity so that we might ultimately transform it in the light of our love.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! - THE PRAYER - PENTATONIX

THE SOUL FELT ITS WORTH

O holy night the stars are brightly shining
It is the night of our dear Savior's birth
Long lay the world in sin and error pining
Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth

Meister Eckhart, the 16th century mystic and theologian, in typical mystical fashion, is credited with saying, “We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.” I think helping other souls to feel their worth is the very way we all birth God into the world each and every day. It is through our actions, through helping other people feel worthy, embraced, and loved, that we can each make the divine present.
How would our world be transformed if the gift we gave our loved ones, and even our not-so-loved ones, the gift of worthiness? What if we all focused on helping others to see themselves the way God sees them - as beloved treasures?
Have you ever been in the presence of a person who made you feel transformed, worthy, and deserving of love and admiration?
The lyrics of “O Holy Night” say in a world of sin and error, He came and people finally knew how it felt to be valued and loved.
My hope for each of you this Christmas season and beyond is not only that you feel the worth of your own soul, but that you help others do the same. You are worthy; you are loved. May you always feel worthy, blessed, and loved and may your presence help others to feel the same.
Merry Christmas!

THIS CHRISTMAS

This Christmas, mend a quarrel.
Seek out a forgotten friend.
Dismiss suspicion, and replace it with trust.
Write a love letter. Share some treasure.
Give a soft answer. Encourage youth.
Manifest your loyalty in word and deed.
Keep a promise. Find the time.
Forgo a grudge. Forgive an enemy.
Listen. Apologize if you were wrong. Try to understand.
Flout envy. Examine your demands on others.
Think first of someone else. Appreciate.
Be kind; be gentle. Laugh a little. Laugh a little more.
Deserve confidence. Take up arms against malice.
Decry complacency. Express your gratitude.
Go to church. Welcome a stranger.
Gladden the heart of a child.
Take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of the earth.
Speak your love. Speak it again. Speak it still once again.

Christmas is celebration, and there is no celebration
that compares with the realization of its true meaning -
with the sudden stirring of the heart that has extended
itself toward the core of life. Then, only then,
is it possible to grasp the significance of the first Christmas -
to savor in the inward ear the wild, sweet music of the angel choir; to envision the star-struck sky, and glimpse,
behind the eyelids the ray of light that fell athwart
a darkened path and changed the world.

TEARS - OUR MOST PRIMAL LANGUAGE

Skillfully blending both art and science, Los Angeles artist Rose-Lynn Fisher created a project titled “The Topography of Tears.” She collected 100 samples of tears and photographed them through an optical microscope at magnification 100X.. She believes the tears are the medium of our most primal language. She writes, "tears are evidence of our inner life overflowing its boundaries. They release us to the possibility of catharsis, realignment and reunion. It is as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop in the ocean.”

I share her reverence for tears and their expression. While some may believe that crying is a factor of maturation and so the older we get the less we should cry, I respectfully disagree. In my many years is a therapist, I have come to appreciate the expression of tears as a sign of tenderness, not weakness. I have learned that the sharing of this vulnerability requires and is an indicator of inner strength. I continue to learn firsthand what true courage looks like in the presence of those who are bravely willing to share their tears. When another gifts me with their tears, and the depth and range of feeling that catalyzed them, I feel honored and entrusted. I am grateful to be the recipient and the holder of this intimate and highly sensitive form of expression. I feel privileged to be part of this deeply felt and very sacred aspect of what it is to be human.
~Mimi O’Connor

BELONGING

The basic need of all human beings is the need to belong. To belong to family, to belong to friends, to belong to a community, a congregation, a school, an organization. When this need is denied it can have devastating effects. The pain of not belonging is the most difficult pain to bear. This pain often leads to physical and/or psychological illness.

APPRECIATION

I believe that appreciation is a holy thing, that when we look for what's best in a person we happen to be with in the moment,
we are doing what God does. So in loving and appreciating our neighbor, we are participating in something sacred.
~Fred Rogers

SUNSETS ON BOW LAKE

HEAL - Documentary
(Can be viewed on Amazon Prime Video and YouTube)

RELEASEMENT

"Releasement, which is just another word for forgiveness, doesn't entirely work unless we have a larger comfort, a safe and more beautiful enclosure to move toward. If we only empty out, and do not refill with something better, there is still a gaping hole within us. The attempt at forgiveness will not go deep or endure. Without something positive, comforting and loving to fill that hole up (which some call grace), we're left to depend entirely on willpower— and our willpower is normally very weak, especially on those days of loneliness, stress, tiredness and hunger. So we've got to keep our aloneness and emptiness filled with something loving and positive. This is the primary work of spirituality. I know that the word 'prayer' has been so trivialized, but it basically means refilling our souls with 'Everything that is good and noble, everything that is virtuous and worthy of praise', as Paul says in his letter from a Roman prison that could be called an early lesson in the power of positive thinking (Philippians 4:7-8).

If we can find a way to live inside of a deep gratitude for our own grace and mercy, past hurts have very little power to cause us pain in any lasting way. They are not worth our time or energy. They are mere sludge and dredge in the great school and journey of life. The gratuitous surrendering of hurts ("forgiveness"), the refusal to make them our identity, is almost the heart of the matter. If you do not transform your pain, you will with 100 percent certainty transmit it to others. And, I am afraid, you will have pain! Both the Buddha and Jesus seem to say that pain is part of the deal, and its overcoming is the very shape of enlightenment."
~Richard Rohr

MAY ALL BEINGS BE HAPPY

One day my teacher told me of an incident that had happened in the monastery. An English woman, a friend of his, had arrived and was immediately angry with him, standing in front of him shouting and waving her arms. I was shocked to hear this, for in my mind I could not understand how anyone could be angry at this beautiful, smiling brown skinned man, so I asked the question, ‘Bhante, what did you do ?’
“Oh, he said, I just waited for the anger to pass, then my friend was back.”
This is the power of love.
Hatred is never overcome by more hatred.
Only love overcomes hatred,
This is an eternal law.
(Dhammapada : verse 5)
It is only when we are out of balance that we allow ourselves to be abused and drawn into conflict. Choosing, taking sides, arguing who is right and who is wrong, always seeking blame and humiliation of the other.
Love exists beyond this level of mind and is the only true and real balance in our life.
It is love that will bring peace to ourselves and the world, but this practice of Loving Kindness (Metta Bhavana) is rarely fully understood.
Here is the truth we must understand :
We don’t practice Loving Kindness to change the other. We practice Loving Kindness so that we can be with the other – however they are!
This is our strength, not to continually insist that the world and everything in it, is always the way we think it should be so that we can be happy. Vipassana and Loving Kindness is a very mature way of life and living, it says ‘I accept you as you are and make no demands that you should be different so that I can be happy.’
Love is the real and beautiful power in our life.
It is never weak and never subservient. It manifests in every moment as complete and unconditional acceptance of the universe exactly as it is in this moment. Things are like this, that is the reality of this moment, now, what is our place in this ?
With awareness we see, with love we accept, with wisdom we respond.
May all beings be happy.
~Michael Kewley

SURRENDER

Surrender is what cleans off the barnacles that have been clinging to the soul. It is the final act of human openness. Without it I am doomed to live inside a stagnant world called the self. The problem is that the self is a product of my own making. I myself shape the self. I construct it one experience, one attitude, one effort at a time till the person I become—rich in reality or starved for it—is finished. I shape me, great or small, wizened or insulated, out of the tiny little measures of newness that I allow to penetrate the depths of my darkness one dollop at a time. What I do not let into my world can never stretch my world, can never give it new color, can never fill it with a new kind of air, can never touch the parts of me that I never knew were there. What I once imagined must forever be, what I relived in memory for years, is no more. Openness saves me from the boundaries of the self and surrender to the moment is the essence of openness.
Surrender does not simply mean that I quit grieving what I do not have. It means that I surrender to new meanings and new circumstances, that I begin to think differently and to live somewhere that is totally elsewhere. I surrender to meanings I never cared to hear—or heard, maybe, but was not willing to understand.
And, hardest to bear of all, all arguments to the contrary are useless.
Surrender is the crossover point of life. It distinguishes who I was from who I have become. What is left is the spiritual obligation to accept reality so that the spiritual life can really happen to me.
There is a time to let the thing go, there is a time to put a thing down, however unresolved, however baffling, however wrong, however unjust. There are some things in life that cannot be changed, however intent we are to change them. There is a time to let surrender take over so that the past does not consume the present, so that new life can come, so that joy has a chance to surprise us again.
~Joan Chittister, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope

LOVE

“Love has to spring from within. You can’t coerce it from another person, but you can be it, and it catches on. It’s very catchy. You are it, and then somebody else catches it from you. When I am centered, I can walk into any vibrational field and take it and convert it. I am just feeling love, so whatever they are giving to me – anger, paranoia, distrust – I am just taking it all in and converting it. I see the net they are stuck in, this mind net that is each person’s own model of the universe, so instead of climbing into it with them, putting both of us in it, my job is to say, “Yes, I see your net, but we are here.” Then, immediately, here we are on a new level."
~ Ram Dass

SORROWS

You don’t get to choose the events that come your way nor the sorrows that interrupt your life. They will likely be a surprise to you, catching you off guard and unprepared. You hold your head in your hands and lament your weak condition and wonder what you ought to do. To suffer, that is common to all. To suffer and still keep your composure, your faith and your smile, that is remarkable. Pain will change you more than success or good fortune. Suffering shapes your perception of life, your values and priorities, your goals and your dreams. Your pain is changing you.
~ David Crosby

MEMORIES

Each one of us is the custodian of an inner world that we carry around with us. Sadly, memory seems to be focused almost exclusively on past woundedness and hurt, some of it induced and some real. It’s sad that people don’t use their good memories and revisit again and again the harvest of memory that is within them, and live out of the riches of that harvest, rather than out of the poverty of their woundedness. . . You can go back within yourself to great things that have happened to you and enjoy them and allow them to shelter and bless you again.
~John O’Donohue

SEEING THE GOODNESS

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed . . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.
~Thomas Merton

THE TEMPLE OF HEALING

We all need healing at different times in our lives. Sometimes we need healing for physical illness. At other times, we need to heal the traumas that we’ve suffered and find ways to release the difficulties of the past we carry in our bodies. We need release from the struggles and emotions brought about by our conflicts and the pain we experience from the follies of humanity.
To heal we cannot reject our illness and grief or use anger and aversion to try to get rid of them. Instead, we have to bring a tender, healing energy to all that is sick or torn, what is broken or lost. In the Buddhist prayer of healing, similar to the spirit of Jesus, we recite: “May I be the healing medicine for all who are sick. May I bring healing to myself and others.” We believe that healing is possible and dedicate ourselves to be part of that healing. We become tender and wise with ourselves and those around us, especially when we are experiencing fear and grief ourselves.
Sometimes this is all that healing asks, that we become present. You should never underestimate your power to heal when you step toward difficulty with courage and love, when you touch pain with healing rather than fear. Our healing comes with our own kind attention and through the kind embrace of another. As long as you can, find a passion for the preciousness of life, and bring this care to the healing of your heart and body.
~Jack Kornfield

REFLECTION

"If you must look back, look back forgivingly.
If you must look forward, do so prayerfully.
However, the wisest thing you can do is to be present
in the present...... Gratefully"
~Maya Angelou

EAGLES

In June, here on Bow Lake, Center Strafford, NH, the eagles adopted a baby red-tailed hawk. The theory is that the male eagle brought the newly hatched hawk into their nest for food but the female’s motherly instincts kicked in and she started feeding it along with their young eaglet. Both have survived and they fledged together at 8 weeks. The size difference is remarkable. Also the red tailed hawk usually does not eat fish fish which is a staple in the eagles diet. It will be interesting to see if the hawk will continue to eat fish.
See PHOTO

MEDITATION ON VULNERABILITY - TARA BRACH

WHO HAS LIVED WELL?

We can’t cage life. We cannot freeze the present happy day under glass. We can’t impale it like a butterfly in a frame. No, life moves inexorably on, whether we go with it or not. It rocks and lurches and limps along. It reels from high to low at a pace often too wild to follow, sometimes slow to bear.
The myth of life lived on an even keel persists in the minds of many, but seduces only the weak of heart. Life is a growing thing going from seed to sapling, from pillar to post, hither and yon, forwards and backwards but always, always toward its purpose, the shaping of the self into a person of quality, compassion, and joy. For that to happen, every smallest segment must be faced and cannot be fled. Life is not controllable; it is only doable.
Therefore, the keeping of the beat of life, the getting to the marrow of each of its measures, all of its elements is what the dance of life is really about. Who has lived well? Those who have sucked the juice of life from every period of its growing. Who is the happy person? Those who have survived each of these elements and found themselves to be more human, more wise, more kindly, more just, more flexible, more integrated because of having lived through that period of time, that moment of definition, that phase of survival, that streak of chastening awareness.
No doubt about it, the cycle of time shapes and reshapes our misshapen selves until we have the opportunity to become what we can.
~Joan Chittister

OPENING AND CALMING MEDITATION - Tara Brach

TRUST

Trust is a feeling of confidence or conviction that things can unfold within a dependable framework that embodies order and integrity. We may not always understand what is happening to us, or to another, what is occurring in a particular situation; but if we trust ourselves, or another, or we place our trust in a process or an ideal, we can find a powerful stabilizing element in bracing security, balance, and openness within the trusting, which in some way, if not based on naivety, intuitively guides us and protects us from harm or self-destruction.
If we don’t immediately know what there is to trust in ourselves maybe we need to look a little deeper, to dwell a little longer with ourselves in stillness and in simply being. If we are unaware of what we are doing a good deal of the time, and we don’t particularly like the way things turn out in our lives, perhaps it’s time to pay closer attention, to be more in touch, to observe the choices we make and their consequences down the road. Perhaps we could experiment with trusting the present moment, excepting whatever we feel or think or see in this moment because this is what is present now. If we can take a stand here, and let go into the full texture of now, we may find that this very moment is worthy of our trust.

MORE KINDNESS ALWAYS

Being fully present in each moment of your life facilitates kindness, as it increases your awareness of the people around you.
In the quest to create a gentler, more loving world, kindness is the easiest tool we can use. Though it is easy to overlook opportunities to be kind, our lives are replete with situations in which we can be helpful, considerate, thoughtful, and friendly to loved ones and associates, as well as strangers. The touching, selfless acts of kindness that have the most profoundly uplifting effects are often the simplest: a word of praise, a gentle touch, a helping hand, a gesture of courtesy, or a smile. Such small kindnesses represent an unconditional, unrestricted form of love that we are free to give or withhold at will. When you give the gift of kindness, whether in the form of assistance, concern, or friendliness, your actions create a beacon of happiness and hope that warms people's hearts.
The components of kindness are compassion, respect, and generosity. Put simply, kindness is the conscious act of engaging others in a positive way without asking whether those individuals deserve to be treated kindly. All living beings thrive on kindness. A single, sincere compliment can turn a person's entire world around. Holding a door or thanking someone who has held a door for you can inspire others to practice politeness and make already kind individuals feel good about their efforts. Smiling at people you meet -- even those who make you feel like frowning -- can turn a dreary encounter into a delightful one, for both of you. Every kind act has a positive influence on the individual who has performed said act as well as on the recipient, regardless of whether the act is acknowledged. Kindness brings about more kindness and slowly but surely takes a positive toll on humanity.
Weaving the thread of kindness into your everyday life can be as easy as choosing to offer a hearty "Good morning" and "Good night" to your coworkers or neighbors, a stranger on the street, or the grocery store clerk. When you commit a kind act, you are momentarily disconnected from your ego and bonded with the individual who has benefited from your kindness. Being fully present in each moment of your life facilitates kindness as it increases your awareness of the people around you. You'll discover that each act of kindness you engage in makes the world, in some small way, a better place.

BEAUTY

Seeing the beauty in animals and plants is a form of love and longing; and we can see the animal, as we see the plant, patient and willing to come together and increase — not out of physical lust, not out of suffering, but bowing to necessities that are greater than lust and suffering and more powerful than will and resistance.
Oh that humans might humbly receive and earnestly bear this mystery that fills the earth down to the smallest thing, and feel it as part of life’s travail, instead of taking it lightly. If they could only be respectful of this fertility, which is undivided, whether in spiritual or physical form. For this spiritual creativity stems from the physical, derives from that erotic essence, and is but an airier, more delightful, more eternal iteration of its lush sensuality.
~RaIner Maria Rilke

COMFORT

There are some kinds of pain that cannot be taken away in life. Loss. Hurt. Rejection. Disability. But those who enter into the pain of another know what it is to talk about the love of a God who does not change the circumstance that form us but walks through them with us every step of the way.
Comfort is a small and tender thing. All it takes is regular presence, patient listening and genuine concern. It demands that we go out of ourselves to the other in ways that advantage us not a whit.
To go down into pain with another breaks open the heart of the God who looks among us always for the face most like God’s own.
~Joan Chittister —from Songs of the Heart: Reflections on the Psalms
The psalm verse Sister Joan reflected on is from Ps 23: “Though I walk in the valley of darkness, no evil do I fear. Your rod and staff comfort me.”

GROWTH

It is the wind and the rain, O God, the cold and the storm that make this earth of Thine to blossom and bear its fruit. So in our lives it is storm and stress and hurt and suffering that make real men and women bring the worlds's work to its highest perfection. Let us learn then in these growing years to respect the harder sterner aspects of life together with its joy and laughter, and to weave them all into the great web which hangs holy to the Lord.
~W.E.B. DuBois

THE FABLE ABOUT THE PORCUPINES

It was the coldest winter ever. Many animals died because of the cold. The porcupines, realizing the situation, decided to group together to keep warm. This way they covered and protected themselves; but the quills of each one wounded their closest companions.
After a while, they decided to distance themselves one from the other and they began to die, alone and frozen. So they had to make a choice; either accept the quills of their companions or disappear from the earth. Wisely, they decided to go back to being together. They learned to live with the little wounds caused by the close relationship with their companions in order to receive the warmth that came from others. This way they were able to survive.

The gateway to full intimacy and love is our capacity to open to vulnerability. In meditation, we explore how bringing nurturing, kind presence to the places of suffering in our own being leads to authentic, loving connection with others.

GRACE

Grace is always with us. It flows like a river through our lives, artfully reminding us that there is magic and power beyond what our eyes can see. At times we catch its subtle beauty, like during chance meetings, near misses, and insights that seem to come from nowhere. Other times we experience grace in all its powerful surety such as when a job or relationship comes to an end. Though we may forget that this is grace at work too, it is indeed influencing our lives, helping us to move forward and take the next step. Grace exists in all situations, in every moment, yet all too often we may overlook its presence.

Imagine how it would feel to live an entire day in grace, to fully appreciate that your day is unfolding in absolute perfection. Whereas usually you might miss the magic in ordinary events and interactions, on this day you would recognize them all as little miracles. Perhaps you could begin with your first deep breaths in the morning, becoming aware that there is an abundant supply of air for you to breathe. Your lungs know just how to carry oxygen to your blood, and your blood knows where to carry it from there. This is grace at work. You might appreciate the brilliant sunshine, the warm summertime rain, or the possibilities for learning that greet you at every turn. You might notice the ease with which you do your job or laugh with a close friend. These things are also grace. Even laying your head down at the end of this day and resting in the stillness of night is grace.

With each opportunity you give yourself to enjoy this current of benevolence, you may discover a deeper peace. Your faith may strengthen and your heart may open. You might begin to wonder if struggle is really all that necessary after all. By living this one day in grace, you might open the door to many more

GREAT HEART MEDITATION

We're going to begin our practice today by bringing our attention to the "Great Heart" or “The Sacred Heart.” The spaciousness that we can enter when we allow our attention into the back body. In normal life most of us keep our attention moving forward. We focus in the front of our body and we actually ignore the area at our back. What happens when we do this we naturally identify with our outgoing egoic consciousness. We tend to look at the world as something separate from us and as something that we need to either attract or to avoid. Always trying to attract or push away. Whereas when we move into the back body it connects us to our larger self. As you learn to enter and sense your way into the spaciousness that opens out from behind the heart a very amazing thing happens. You begin to find yourself very naturally connected to what we refer to in yoga as the "great heart" or the "big heart." The presence that contains and in a sense blesses us through our life. The "big heart" or the "great heart" is a very deep source of nourishment and compassion. It's actually an entrance point or a doorway into the source of life itself. In Christian meditation it is called the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It’s a doorway into the ever present reality that the sages of yoga call consciousness, presence or in Sanskrit it's called SAT CHIT ANANDA. SAT means being, existence, reality has being. CHIT means awareness, reality is aware, it's intelligent. And ANANDA means bliss or joy. So when we touch into the heart of reality whether in meditation or with open eyes we may experience our the profound energy of our Source as having any or all of these qualities. In other words we might experience ourselves, our reality as pure being, the sense of presence or of nowness, being present in the moment or Divine Presence, the presence of God. Or we may experience reality as awareness. So our capacity to be aware is an entrance point into greater awareness. And we can also experience reality as bliss, joy and love. The contentment when you look at at your child, or your lover or your friend or your cat or your dog. Or when you feel just the simple relaxation of happiness. This is the connection to that is the great joy that is the nature of reality. And one way that we tune into that great being, that blissfulness is bringing by our presence to that place in the back body. There is a subtle doorway, a portal that leads out the back of the heart center and will naturally open into the great heart space. As we tune into the back body we actually become open to the ever present love, the awareness and the pure being that surrounds us and underlies our life. And little by little you begin to realize that the great heart is both your true self and paradoxically it's also a protecting and folding presence that contains our whole body and the universe itself.

HEALING THE HEART ~ Jack Kornfield
Oscar Wilde wrote, “Hearts are meant to be broken.” As we heal through meditation, our hearts break open to feel fully. Powerful feelings, deep unspoken parts of ourselves arise, and our task in meditation is first to let them move through us, then to recognize them and allow them to sing their songs. A poem by Wendell Berry illustrates this beautifully.
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
Where I left them, asleep like cattle …
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
And the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

What we find as we listen to the songs of our rage or fear, loneliness or longing, is that they do not stay forever. Rage turns into sorrow; sorrow turns into tears; tears may fall for a long time, but then the sun comes out. A memory of old loss sings to us; our body shakes and relives the moment of loss; then the armoring around that loss gradually softens; and in the midst of the song of tremendous grieving, the pain of that loss finally finds release.
In truly listening to our most painful songs, we can learn the divine art of forgiveness. While there is a whole systematic practice of forgiveness that can be cultivated, both forgiveness and compassion arise spontaneously with the opening of the heart. Somehow, in feeling our own pain and sorrow, our own ocean of tears, we come to know that ours is a shared pain and that the mystery and beauty and pain of life cannot be separated. This universal pain, too, is part of our connection with one another, and in the face of it we cannot withhold our love any longer.
We can learn to forgive others, ourselves, and life for its physical pain. We can learn to open our heart to all of it, to the pain, to the pleasures we have feared. In this, we discover a remarkable truth: Much of spiritual life is self-acceptance, maybe all of it. Indeed, in accepting the songs of our life, we can begin to create for ourselves a much deeper and greater identity in which our heart holds all within a space of boundless compassion.
Most often this healing work is so difficult we need another person as an ally, a guide to hold our hand and inspire our courage as we go through it. Then miracles happen.
~Jack Kornfield

ATTITUDE~Richard Rohr
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
—Viktor Frankl
The quote above sounds like something a teacher of contemplation would say! The practice of contemplation helps us to stand back from ourselves and take the view of what I and others call “the stable witness.” Then we are not attached to our thoughts or our knee-jerk reactions, and we can find the space we need to choose the way we want to act or the words that would be most helpful. While he is not known as a teacher of contemplation, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1905—1997) developed this wisdom during his time as an inmate in Auschwitz. He writes:
The experiences of camp life show that humanity does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Humanity can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the people who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. . . .

KINDNESS ~ John O'Donohue

There is a kindness that dwells deep down in things; it presides everywhere, often in the places we least expect. The world can be harsh and negative; but if we remain generous and patient, kindness inevitably reveals itself. Something deep in the human soul seems to depend on the presence of kindness; something instinctive in us expects it, and once we sense it we are able to trust and open ourselves…
The word ‘kindness’ has a gentle sound which seems to echo the presence of compassionate goodness. When someone is kind to you, you feel understood and seen. There is no judgement or harsh perception directed towards you. Kindness has gracious eyes; it is not small-minded or competitive; it wants nothing back for itself. Kindness strikes a resonance with the depths of your own heart; it also suggests that your vulnerability though somehow exposed is not taken advantage of; rather, it has become an occasion of dignity and empathy. Kindness casts a different light, an evening light that has the depth of colour and patience to illuminate what is complex and rich in difference.
Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the instinct that at the deepest level of reality some intimate kindness holds sway. This is the heart of blessing. To believe in blessing is to believe that our being here, our very presence in the world, is itself the first gift, the primal blessing…

THE NORLAND NIGHT TRAIN - Eric Braa- Sleep Story

THE NOBLE HEART
Bodhichitta is a Sanskrit word that means "noble or awakened heart." It is said to be present in all beings. Just as butter is inherent in milk and oil is inherent in a sesame seed, this soft spot is inherent in you and me.
It is said that in difficult times, it is only bodhichitta that heals. When inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself. This is the time to touch the genuine heart of bodhichitta. In the midst of loneliness, in the midst of fear, in the middle of feeling misunderstood and hurt and rejected is the heartbeat of all things, the genuine heart of sadness.
Just as a jewel that has been buried in the earth for a million years is not discolored or harmed, in the same way this noble heart is not affected by our kicking and screaming. The jewel can be brought out into the light at any time, and it will glow as brilliantly as if nothing had ever happened. No matter how committed we are to unkindness, selfishness, or greed, the genuine heart of bodhichitta cannot be lost. It is here in all that lives, never marred and completely whole.
~Pema Chodron

HADO
The study of hado tells us that the energetic vibrations from our thoughts affect our physical realities
Walking through a Japanese garden, one truly feels the life force energy that is known as Hado. Hado isn't just present in Japan, but it is a concept that has existed in Japan for centuries. The two Japanese characters that make up the word Hado mean "wave" and "move" -- perfect words to describe the energy vibrations that permeate all life. Hado is present in all things, animate and inanimate. It resides everywhere, even in the air and in people.
The study of hado tells us that the energetic vibrations from our thoughts affect on our physical realities. Each of us has the ability to manifest a specific intention through the hado that we send out -- from making our jewelry shine to changing the atmosphere of a room full of people to transforming the hado of an empty space. However, we are often unaware that our thoughts are creating vibrations in the world outside our minds. Once we know that this is the case, we can become more aware of our negative thinking and train ourselves to stay positive and think with intention.
Giving thanks for a meal before we eat can change the energy of our food. Expressing gratitude by thoughts or words makes a huge difference to both the giver and recipient because you are sending them hado. A kind smile really makes a difference when you work consciously with hado. Once we become aware of the power of hado, we can create positive changes in every area of our lives: our physical space, mental and emotional health, relationships, and businesses. One of the most important principles of hado is to monitor your thoughts and intentions every day. Enjoy the improvements that you will create in your life and the world around you by consciously working with hado.

JULIAN OF NORWICH
What does Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century Catholic anchoress, who spent the majority of her adult life cloistered in a small stone cell attached to a church, have to teach us here and now? She reveals the feminine face of the Divine in all its radiance and reminds us to seek God there. She teaches us that God’s love has nothing to do with rules and retribution and everything to do with mercy and compassion. She shows us that our failings and transgressions are simply an opportunity to learn and grow, and should be honored as such, but not dwelled upon. She translates the sorrows of this life as tastes of Christ’s passion and assures us that all passing pain will be transmuted into endless joy.
Most of all, Julian of Norwich promises that, in spite of appearances to the contrary, all is well. Not just that creation was beautifully made to begin with, and that it will all work out in the end, but that everything is all right at every moment, if we could only look through the eyes of love. Such a perspective is difficult to sustain, Julian would be the first to admit. In rare moments of unitive consciousness—watching the sun rise, maybe, or giving birth, or singing to God in community—we may have fleeting glimpses of the cosmic design and see that it is good. But then the veil drops again and we forget.

GOOD FRIDAY CHANT

AWAKENING

FIND FREEDOM WITH FORGIVENESS
Forgiveness is not something you do solely for the person who hurt you—it is something you must do for yourself. Holding grievances against others invokes a chain reaction of negative feelings on the neurological level, creating a cycle of harmful energy and emotions.
By opening the heart and allowing grudges and anger to move through this boundless space, powerful healing can occur through meditation and prayer. Although it is not easy to move immediately or seamlessly from injury to pardon, practice and patience will lead you on the road to true forgiveness.
True, deep forgiveness accesses the recognition that all humans, however terrible, hateful, mean, disparaging, insensitive and hurtful their actions, still exist with some basic goodness. This realization can transcend into an acknowledgement that we are all intertwined as part of a greater whole, and when we forgive someone else we are forgiving another part of ourselves.
It seems to me that forgiveness of others becomes easier when we recognize our own failings and faults and we embrace our humanity. We are all imperfect beings. What I have trouble forgiving in others is often a fault that I deny in myself.
In his book, The Body Keeps The Score, Bessel van de Kolk says, “Being able to feel safe with other people is the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.”
For trauma survivors protecting ourselves from hurtful encounters is necessary whenever possible. We can be easily triggered and lose that sense of safety that took us so long to acquire.

NOTHINGNESS
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely ... I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is every- where.
~Thomas Merton

COMPASSION AND LOVING-AWARENESS
To pay attention in a way that leads to freedom requires the attention to be loving. If it doesn’t have love in it, attention becomes cold or distant or potentially judging. When we bring a quality of loving awareness we can be both present for the mystery of life and be received in a field of compassion and love. The greatest thing you can do for another being is to revive that unconditional love that comes when making contact with them beyond all the changing conditions which is pure consciousness. Everything transforms when we identify with being the loving awareness to the story instead of the actor. In India there is a description of what it means to be seen in that way. It is called “the glance of mercy.” The glance of mercy is the ability to look at someone with eyes of so much understanding and love that they are seen beyond all the drama of their life, beyond their mistakes and successes- to see ones essence beyond all that. To see the secret beauty in another is the ground of every relationship. And also to be able to behold oneself in that same way.

FORGIVENESS REQUIRES GRATITUDE ~Fred Luskin

COMPASSION MEDITATION
Compassion is an aspect of human nature. It’s means taking account of our relationship with others. Bring to mind a situation from the recent past or from a time long ago when you felt touched by someone’s kindness. It could be something as simple as a welcoming smile or a friend listening to you attentively when you were going through a difficult time. It could be a nurse or physician treating you when you were ill. Perhaps a family member who simply gave you a hug when you needed one. ….Now bring to mind what that felt like. Making you feel assured, recognized, valued, cared for and loved. Recall how that experience calmed you down, as if bringing equilibrium back into your life when you felt disoriented. To feel impacted in this way by someone’s kindness and compassion is a natural human experience ~a powerful expression of our social nature. Let’s acknowledge that each one of us has this capacity and the ability to do this for someone else. To bring to others a feeling of assurance, comfort and safety is within each one of us. Let us make the intention to bring this part of who we are to someone when needed.
“ Whenever possible be kind. It is always possible.”
~Dali Lama

PALE BLUE DOT -1994
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
~Carl Sagan

NEW YEAR BLESSINGS
The year ends and we begin a new circuit around our own beautiful sun star, twirling amidst the galaxies.
Take a breath, quiet your heart and listen deeply.
There is so much coming and going, and yet…
feel how underneath it all is a vast silence
and a spaciousness that holds everything in its balance.
In human incarnation there are inevitable periods of difficulty, personal and collective. Yet with wisdom and a good heart, our personal sufferings can temper us and help us live with dignity and find an indestructible spirit in ourselves. And in the same way, we can learn to bear the difficulties of the world with compassion and courageously do what we can to mend the broken places.
Yet difficulties are never the end of the story. There is always a return of the light.There is always grass that pushes itself through the cracks in the sidewalk. You are this life force constantly being reborn every morning at breakfast.
And while the news often features the worst of humanity, there are a billion acts of human kindness every hour of every day. Take another breath and sense this truth.
A most trustworthy and blessed project is to align yourself with compassion, to plant seeds of goodness, to use the creative force of your life to bring understanding, awakening and love to all. Foster trust in life's renewal power.
Pablo Neruda explains further,
“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.”
Renewal is happening.
Take quiet time to listen to your heart, to meditate and to rest amidst the great turnings.
Feel the renewal of spring that can be born in you.
Align yourself with goodness.
Let yourself blossom like a lotus or whatever unique flower you are,
shining in the world, offering tiny seeds of love amidst it all.
~Jack Kornfield

WE ARE HEALERS OF THE WORLD
There’s something very special about stories. They touch something that is human in us and unchanging. Perhaps this is why important knowledge is passed on through stories. It’s what holds the culture together. A culture has a story, and every person participates in it.
The world is made up of stories. This is a Jewish story from the 14th century:
In the beginning it was only the holy darkness, the Ein Sof, the source of life. In the course of history, as a moment in time, this world, the world of thousands and thousands of things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light. And then there was an accident, and the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. The wholeness of the world, the light of the world, was scattered into a thousands and thousands of fragments of light. And then these fragments fell into all events and all people, where they remain deeply hidden until this very day.
Now, according the story, the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are all here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and in all people, to find the light in every person we meet and every event of our lives. To find it and make it visible once again. We are here to restore the innate wholeness of the world.
This a very important story for our times. The task is called tikkun olam. It’s the restoration of the world.
And this is, of course, a collective task. It Involves all people who have ever been born, all people presently alive, all people yet to be born. We are all healers of the world.
This story opens a sense of possibility. It’s not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It’s about healing the world that touches you. It’s about healing your world. According to this story you are here because you are exactly what’s needed in your world. It is your mission and responsibility to find that hidden light in all events and in all people. In doing so you will heal the world.

A CHRISTMAS MESSAGE
Every year of life waxes and wanes. Every stage of life comes and goes. Every facet of life is born and then dies. Every good moment soon becomes a memory. Every perfect period of living slips through our fingers and disappears. Every hope dims and every possibility eventually turns to clay. Until Christmas comes again.
Then we are called at the deepest, most subconscious, least cognizant level to begin once more to live newly again.
Christmas brings us all back to the crib of life to start over: aware of what has gone before, conscious that nothing can last, but full of hope that this time, finally, we can learn what it takes to live well, grow to full stature of soul and spirit, get it right.
There is a child in each of us waiting to be born again. It is to those looking for life that the figure of the Christchild, child, beckons. Christmas is not for only for children. It is for those who refuse to give up and grow old, for those to whom life comes newly and with purpose each and every day, for those who can let yesterday go so that life can be full of new possibility always, for those who are agitated with newness whatever their age. Life is for the living, for those in whom Christmas is a feast without finish, a celebration of change, a call to begin once more the journey to human joy and holy meaning.
– from In Search of Belief by Joan Chittister

SURROUND YOURSELF WITH LOVE
One of the nicest gifts you can give to yourself is surrounding yourself with loving and kind people.
In our everyday life we are surrounded by a variety of people. Some of the people we deal with on a daily basis are a joy to be with, and their loving presence nurtures and encourages us. Others may have the opposite effect, draining us of our energy, making us feel tired and uncomfortable. Our well-being can be easily influenced by those around us, and if we can keep this in mind, we will have greater insights into the quality of our social interactions and their energetic effect on us.
Once we think more deeply about the people we interact with, it becomes easier for us to work toward filling our lives with people who help us cultivate healthy and positive relationships. Even though it might not always seem like we have much control over who we are with, we do. The power to step back from toxicity lies within us. All we have to do is take a few moments to reflect on how another person makes you feel. Assessing the people we spend the most time with allows us to see if they add something constructive to, or subtract from, our lives. Should a friend sap our strength, for example, we can simply set the intention to tell them how we feel or simply spend less time with them.
We will find that the moment we are honest with ourselves about our own feelings, the more candid we can be with others about how they make us feel. While this may involve some drastic changes to our social life it can bring about a personal transformation that will truly empower us, since the decision to live our truth will infuse our lives with greater happiness.
When we surround ourselves with positive people, we clear away the negativity that exists around us and create more room to welcome nurturing energy. Doing this not only enriches our lives but also envelopes us in a supportive and healing space that fosters greater growth, understanding, and love of ourselves as well as those we care about.
~Madyson Taylor

THE LONGEST TIME

FORGIVENESS

In the practice of yoga forgiveness is paramount.
What is this human capacity for forgiveness?
What is the human capacity for dignity no matter what the circumstances of life?
In yoga practice forgiveness is, in particular, the capacity to let go, to release the suffering, the sorrows, the burdens of the pains and betrayals of the past, and instead to choose the mystery of love. Forgiveness shifts us from the small separate sense of ourselves to a capacity to renew, to let go, to live in love. As the Bhagavad Gita says, “If you want to see the brave, look to those who can return love for hatred. If you want to see the heroic, look to those who can forgive.”
With forgiveness we are unwilling to attack or wish harm on anyone, including ourselves. And without forgiveness, life would be unbearable. It’s hard to imagine a world without forgiveness, because we would be chained to the suffering of the past and have only to repeat it over and over again. There would be no release.
It’s not easy. “Love and forgiveness is not for the faint-hearted,” the sages of yoga teach. . But someone has to stand up and say, “It stops with me. I will not pass this hatred on. Someone has to say, “I will accept the betrayal and the suffering, and I will bare it, and I will not retaliate.”

THE INNER LIGHT
The Light within everyone is beyond both praise and blame.
Like outer space it knows no boundaries;
It is right here with us, containing it’s serenity and fullness.
It is only when you seek it that you lose it.
You cannot take hold of it nor can you get rid of it;
While you can do neither, it goes on its own way.
You remain silent and it speaks; you speak and it is silent.
The Gate of Heaven is wide open with not a single obstruction before it.
~Yung Chia

A QUESTION FOR EACH DAY
Where will you place the talent you have been given? We must ask that question of ourselves each day of the year. Where will you focus the potential for creative action that is yours? Those are the questions before every man and woman of our time. I think we do not improve on the answer given by Isaiah 2500 years ago, “Here I am, Lord, send me. “
Send me into the Village Square, send me into schools, send me into the day camps for children, send me into to the nursing homes for the elderly and ill, send me into the task of creating beauty, send me into the business world to create more jobs, send me to the political world to struggle for the values I hold dear, send me to the earth as her daughter to love her and to cherish her. Send me to help create the “thousand hidden islands “ not even yet imagined. Then I will know that I have lived and loved well with this precious gift of life that has been given to me.
~Dwight H Judy

THE LOVE IN YOU
The love in you—which is the Spirit in you—always somehow says yes. Love is not something you do; love is something you are. It is your True Self. Love is where you came from and love is where you’re going. It’s not something you can buy. It’s not something you can attain. It’s the presence of God within you, called the Holy Spirit or what some theologians name uncreated grace.
You can’t manufacture this by any right conduct, dear reader. You can’t make God love you one ounce more than God already loves you right now. You can go to church every day for the rest of your life. God isn’t going to love you any more than God loves you right now.
You cannot make God love you any less, either—not an ounce less. Do the most terrible thing and God wouldn’t love you less. You cannot change the Divine mind about you! The flow is constant, total, and 100 percent toward your life. God is for you.
We can’t diminish God’s love for us. What we can do, however, is learn how to believe it, receive it, trust it, allow it, and celebrate it, accepting Trinity’s whirling invitation to join in the cosmic dance.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux (c. 1090–1153) wrote, “Inasmuch as the soul becomes unlike God, so it becomes unlike itself.”.
Catherine LaCugna (1952–1997) ended her giant theological tome God for Us with this one simple sentence:
The very nature of God, therefore, is to seek out the deepest possible communion and friendship with every last creature on this earth.
That’s God’s job description. That’s what it’s all about. And the only thing that can keep you out of this divine dance is fear or self-hatred. What would happen in your life—right now—if you fully accepted what God has created?
Suddenly, this is a very safe universe. You have nothing to be afraid of. God is for you. God is leaping toward you! God is on your side, honestly more than you are on your own.
~Richard Rohr

CONVERSATION WITH RESMAA MENAKEM

ALL THINGS NEW
When I give myself over to organic reality—to the endless interplay of darkness and light, falling and rising—the life I am given is as real and colorful, fruitful and whole as this graced and graceful world and the seasonal cycles that make it so. Though I still grieve as beauty goes to ground, autumn reminds me to celebrate the primal power that is forever making all things new in me, in us, and in the natural world.
~Parker Palmer, On the Brink of Everything

SILENCE
Silence is one of the major thresholds in the world. . . . Meister Eckhart said that there is nothing in the world that resembles God so much as silence. Silence is a great friend of the soul; it unveils the riches of solitude. It is very difficult to reach that quality of inner silence. You must make a space for it so that it may begin to work for you. In a certain sense, you do not need the whole armory and vocabulary of therapies, psychologies, or spiritual programs. If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you. These are some wonderful lines from the French poet Rene Char: "Intensity is silent, its image is not. I love everything that dazzles me and then accentuates the darkness within me." Here is an image of silence as the force that discloses hidden depth. Silence is the sister of the divine.
~John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

LIVING LIFE AS ART
Living life as art requires a readiness to forgive. I do not mean that you should suffer fools gladly, but rather remember your own shortcomings, and when you encounter another with flaws, don't be eager to righteously seal yourself away from the offender forever. Take a few breaths and imagine yourself having just committed the action which has set you at odds.
Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. We leave our homes for work, acting and even believing that we will reach our destinations with no unusual event startling us out of our set expectations. The truth is we know nothing, not where our cars will fail or when buses will stall, whether our places of employment will be there when we arrive, or whether, in fact, we ourselves will arrive whole and alive at the end of our journeys. Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.
Life seems to love the liver of it. Money and power can liberate only if they are used to do so. They can imprison and inhibit more finally than barred windows and iron chains.
~Maya Angelo

WOUNDS
There is perhaps a moment in every life that something darkness comes along. If we are not very careful to recognize its life – damaging potential before it grips us, it can hold us for the rest of our lives. We can become addicted to that wound and use it forever as an identity card. We can turn that wound into sorrow and fortake in us as prison of crippled identity. It is difficult to be objective and gracious about your wounds because they can hurt and weep for years. Yet wounds are not sent to make us small and frightened; they are sent to open us up and to bring graciousness, compassion, and the beauty within us. Wounds offer us a unique gift but they often demand a severe apprenticeship before the door of their blessings opens.

THE PARABLE OF THE PRICKLY PORCUPINE
It was the coldest winter ever – so cold that many animals froze to death.
In an effort to save themselves from this icy fate, the porcupines decided to gather together to fend off the chill.
They huddled close to each other, covered and protected from the elements, and warmed by their collective body heat.
But their prickly quills proved to be a bit of a problem in close proximity – they poked and stabbed each other, wounding their closest companions.
The warmth was wonderful, but the mutual needling became increasingly uncomfortable. Eventually, they began to distance themselves one from the other, scattering in the forest only to end up alone and frozen. Many died.
It soon became clear that they would have to choose between solitary deaths in the frigid wilderness and the discomfort of being needled by their companions’ quills when they banded together.
Wisely, they decided to return to the huddle. They learned to live with the little wounds caused by the close relationship with their fellows hi in order to benefit from the collective heat they generated as a group. In this way they were able to survive.
The gateway to full intimacy and love is our capacity to open to vulnerability. Explore how bringing a nurturing, kind presence to the places of suffering in our own being leads to authentic, loving connection with others

THE BALM OF KINDNESS
The whole world changes when we know ourselves. We gentle it. The fruit of self-knowledge is kindness. Broken ourselves, we bind tenderly the wounds of the other.
The most telling measure of the meaning of kindness in life is memories of unkindness in our own: scenes from a childhood marked by the cruelty of other children, recollections of disdain that scarred the heart, moments of scorn or rejection that leave a person feeling marginalized in the human community. Those whose gaze filled us with fear, shame and humiliation. In those moments of isolation, we remember the impact of the fracturing of hope. We feel again the pain that comes with the assault on that sliver of dignity that refuses to die in us, however much the degradation of the moment.
It is then that we come to understand that kindness, compassion, understanding, acceptance are the irrefutable marks of holiness because we ourselves have known—or perhaps have never known—the balm of kindness for which we so desperately thirsted in those situations. Kindness is an act of God that makes the dry dust of rejection digestible to the human psyche.
Those who have touched the God within themselves, with all their struggles, all their lack, see God everywhere and, most of all, in the helpless, fragile, frightened other.
It is necessary for us to take in without reservation those whom the world casts out because it is they who show us most clearly the face of the waiting God.
~Joan Chittister

TEACHING IN THE TIME OF PANDEMIC ~Jack Kornfield

THE PARABLE OF MUSHIN
From "Everyday Zen" by Charlotte Joko Beck

Once upon a time, in a town called Hope, there live a young man called
Joe. Joe was much into dharma studies, and so he had a Buddhist
name. Joe was called Mushin.

Joe lived a life like anyone else. He went to work and he had a nice
wife; but, despite Joe's interest in the dharma, Joe was a macho,
know-it-all, bitter guy. In fact he was so much that way that one day,
after he'd created all sorts of mayhem at work, his boss said, "I've
had enough of you, Joe. You're fired!" And so Joe left. No job. And
when he got home he found a letter from his wife. And she said, "I've
had enough, Joe. I'm leaving." So Joe had an apartment and himself and
nothing else.

But Joe, Mushin, was not one who gave up easily. He vowed that
although he didn't have a job and wife, he was going to have the one
thing in life that really mattered - enlightenment. And off he rushed
to the nearest bookstore. Joe looked through the latest crop of books
on how to achieve enlightenment. And there was one that he found
especially interesting. It was called How to Catch the Train of
Enlightenment. So he bought the book and pored through it with great
care. And when he'd studied it thoroughly he went home and gave up his
apartment, put all his earthly belongings in his backpack, and went
off to the train station on the edge of the town. The book said that
if you followed all its directions - you do this, and do that, and you
do that - then when the train came you'd be able to catch it. And he
thought, "Great!"

Joe went to the train station, which was a deserted place, and he read
the book once again, memorizing the directions, and then settled down
to wait. He waited and waited and waited. Two, three, four days he
waited for the Train of Enlightenment to come, because the book said
it was sure to come. And he had great faith in the book. Sure enough,
on the fourth day, he heard this great roar in the distance, this
enormous roar. And he knew this must be the Train. So he got ready. He
was so excited because the Train was coming, he could hardly believe
it . . . and . . . whoosh . . . it went by! It was only one blur, it
went by so fast. What had happened? He couldn't catch it at all!

Joe was bewildered but not discouraged. He got out his book again and
studied some more exercises, and he worked and worked and worked as he
sat on the platform, putting everything he had into it. In another
three or four days he once again heard a tremendous roar in the
distance, and this time he was certain he would catch the Train. And
all of a sudden there it was . . . whoosh . . .it was gone. Well what
to do? Because obviously there was a train, it wasn't as though there
was no train. He knew that, but he could not catch it. So he studied
some more and he tried some more, he worked and worked, and the same
thing happened over and over again.

As time went on other people also went to the bookstore and bought the
book. So Joe began to have company. First there were four or five
people watching for the Train, and then there were thirty or forty
people watching for the Train. The excitement was tremendous! Here was
the Answer, obviously coming. They could all hear the roar as the
Train went by and, although nobody ever caught it, there was great
faith that somehow, some day, at least one of them would catch it. If
even one person could catch it, it would inspire the rest. So the
little crowd grew, and the excitement was wonderful.

As time went on, however, Mushin noticed that some of these people
brought their little kids. And they were so absorbed in looking for
the Train that, when the kids tried to get mom and dad's attention,
they were told "Don't bother us, just go play." These little kids were
really being neglected. Mushin, who was not such a bad guy after all,
began to wonder, "Well, gee, I'd like to watch for the Train, but
somebody's got to take care of the kids." So he began to devote some
time to them. He looked in his backpack and took out his nuts and
raisins and chocolate bars and passed all this stuff out to the
kids. Some of them were really hungry. The parent who were watching
for the Train didn't seem to get hungry; but the kids were hungry. And
they had skinned knees, so he found a few bandaids in his backpack and
took care of their knees, and he read them stories from their little
books.

And it began to be that while he still took some time for the
Train, the kids were beginning to be his chief concern. There were
more and more of them. In a few months there were also teenagers, and
with teenagers there is a lot of wild energy. So Mushin organized the
teenagers and set up a baseball team in back of the station. He
started a garden to keep them occupied. And he even encouraged
some of the steadier kids to help him. And before you knew it he had a large
enterprise going. He had less and less time for the Train and he was
angry about it. The important stuff was happening with the adults
waiting for the Train, but he had to take care of all this business
with the kids, and so his anger and his bitterness were boiling. But
no matter what, he knew he had to take care of the kids, so he did.

Over time, hundreds and thousands of Train watchers arrived, with all
their kids and relatives. Mushin was so harried with all the needs of
the people that he had to add on to the train station. He had to make
more sleeping quarters; he had to build a post office and schools and
he was busy; but his anger and his resentment were also right
there. "You know, I'm only interested in enlightenment. Those other
people get to watch the Train and what am I doing really?" But he kept
doing it.

And then one day he remembered that while hed thrown out
most of the books in his apartment, for some reason he had kept one
small volume. So he fished it out of his backpack. The book was How to
Do Zazen. So Joe had a new set of instructions to study. But these
didnt seem so bad. He settled down and learned how to do zazen. Early
in the morning before everyone else was up, hed sit on a cushion and
do his practice for a while. And over time his hectic, demanding
schedule in which he had unwillingly become immersed didnt seem so
much of a strain to him. He began to think that maybe there was some
connection between this zazen, this sitting, and the peace he was
beginning to feel. A few others at the station were also getting a bit
discouraged about the Train they couldn’t catch; so they began to sit
with him. The group did zazen every morning and, at the same time, the
Train-watching enterprise kept expanding. At the next train station
down the tracks there was a whole new colony of train watchers. The
same old problems were developing there, so sometimes his group would
go there and help in straightening out their difficulties. And there
was even a third train station . . . endless work.

They were really, really busy. From morning till night they were
feeding the kids, doing carpentry, running the post office, setting up
the new little clinic all that a community needs to function and
survive. And all this time they weren’t getting to watch for the
Train. It just kept going by. They could hear the roar. And some
jealousy and bitterness were still there. But still, they had to
admit, it wasnt the same anymore; it was there and it wasnt there. The
turning point for Mushin was when he tried something described in his
little book as sesshin. He got together with his group and, in the
corner of the train station, they set up a separate space and for four
or five days they would steadily do zazen. Occasionally theyd hear the
roar of the Train in the distance, but they ignored it and went on
sitting. And they also introduced this hard practice to the other
train stations.

Mushin was now in his fifties. He was showing the effect of the years
of strain and toil. He was getting bent and weary. But by now he no
longer worried about the things he used to worry about. He had
forgotten the big philosophical questions that used to grip him: Do
I exist? Is life real? Is life a dream? He was so busy sitting and
working that everything faded out except for what needed to be done
every day. The bitterness faded. The big questions faded. Finally
there was nothing left for Mushin except what had to be done. But he
no longer felt it had to be done, he just did it.

By now there was an enormous community of people at the train
stations, working, bringing up their children, as well as those who
were waiting for the Train. Some of those slowly were absorbed back
into the community and others would come. Mushin finally came to love
the people watching for the Train, too. He served them, helped them
towatch. So it went for many years. Mushin got older and older, more
and more tired. And his questions were down to zero. There were none
any more. There was just Mushin and his life, doing each second what
needed to be done.

One night, for some reason, Mushin thought, I will sit all night. I
dont know why I want to do it. I'll just do it. For him sitting was no
longer a question of looking for something, trying to improve, trying
to be holy. All those ideas had faded years ago.
For Mushin there was nothing except just sitting:
Hearing a few distant cars at night. Feeling the cool night air.
Enjoying the changes in hisbody. Mushin sat and sat through the night,
and at daybreak he heard the roar of the Train.
Then, ever gently, the Train came to a stop
exactly in from of him.He realized that from the very beginning he
had been on the Train. In fact he was the Train itself. There was no
need to catch the Train. Nothing to realize. Nowhere to go. Just the
wholeness of life itself. All the ancient questions that were no
questions answered themselves. And at last the Train evaporated, and
there was just an old man sitting the night away.

Mushin stretched and arose from his cushion. He went and fixed morning
coffee to share with those arriving for work. And the last we see of
him, he’s in the carpentry shop with some of the older boys, building
a swing set for the playground. Thats the story of Mushin. What was
it Mushin found? I’ll leave that to you.

WANT TO BE HAPPY? BE GRATEFUL

AWAKENING SELF COMPASSION
Hold yourself as a mother holds her beloved child. —Buddha
We are so quick to judge one another. And just as we are hard on others we are even harder on ourselves. With mindfulness, our natural compassion grows. We can see that we are all carrying our own burden of tears. You and everyone you meet are sharing in some measure of the pain present on the planet. You are called upon to witness this pain—in yourself and others—with compassion. But how can we do this when we live in a time where it seems we have lost contact with the power of mercy and compassion, when we have closed off to the suffering of ourselves and others?
We have to begin to sense the tears for ourselves before we can cry for others. These tears are actually a great gift. They are the same moisture that brings new life out of the dry earth every spring. For the Lakota Sioux, grief is considered a great gift because they believe the gods are closest to us when we are suffering. When a Lakota Sioux has suffered a great loss and is grieving, he or she is considered wacan, or “most holy.” Their prayers are believed to be especially powerful, and others will often ask one who grieves to pray on their behalf.
This doesn’t mean that compassion will be easy, especially when you’ve been betrayed or you’ve suffered some irreplaceable loss. As the Sufis pray, “Overcome any bitterness that may have come because I am not up to the magnitude of the pain that has been entrusted to me.”
You may want to heal, but still find yourself slipping back into old habits of anger and resentment. This can be the most frustrating. After struggling for half a century with the British Empire, Mahatma Gandhi said that his most formidable opponent was not the British Empire or the Indian people, but a man named Mohandas K. Gandhi. “With him I seem to have very little influence.”
But it is necessary to learn that you are worthy of being loved. Buddha put it quite simply: “You can search the whole tenfold universe and not find a single being more worthy of love and compassion than the one seated here—yourself.” Self-compassion and self-forgiveness are not weaknesses, but the roots of our courage and magnanimity. Sometimes compassion for ourselves and others seems hard to find. But even if you lose touch with these feelings during your most intense suffering, compassion is an essential part of our true nature. In fact, it is in this self-compassion and self-love that you find the strength to carry a lamp through your darkest nights. And it is by first practicing self-compassion that you find not only a way to hold your own struggles and sorrows in your heart—but through them you learn how to connect with the sufferings and sorrows of all those around.
This self-compassion helps us all survive. It causes us to jump out of the way of an unexpected fast car as we enter the street. We treasure our life. Self-compassion struggles to keep us alive even in situations of complete abandonment and abuse.
As you go through your difficulties, you can learn to bring a quality of loving care to everything you touch. You will find that love and care have an extraordinary capacity to transform the sorrows of your life into a great stream of compassion.
Be gentle with yourself—it should not be a struggle. Know your limitations. Extend your compassion only as far as you feel your heart opening naturally. Plant your seed of trust. It will grow in its season.
As you face loss, frustration, hurt, and conflict, invite a sense of your own dignity. Sit up, stand up tall. Have respect for yourself, and patience and compassion. With these, you can handle anything.
~Jack Kornfield

RADICAL LOVE: REFLECTIONS THAT AWAKEN OUR HEART - Tara Brach

FINDING YOUR TRIBE
We all desire to find our tribe, a community of those that feel comfortable to us and nurture our journey.
Part of being human is the search for an individual identity. Bound to this strong need to establish a unique persona, however, is an equally intense desire for acceptance. It is when we find our individual tribes that both are satisfied. Our tribe members are those people who accept us as we are without reservation and gladly accompany us on our journeys of evolution. Among them, we feel free to be our imperfect selves, to engage unabashedly in the activities we enjoy, and to express our vulnerabilities by relying on our tribe for support. We feel comfortable investing our time and energy in the members of our tribe, and are equally comfortable allowing them to invest their resources in our development.
The individuals who eventually become members of your unique tribe are out there in the wide world waiting for you. You are destined to find them, one by one, as you move through life. Sometimes your own efforts will put you in contact with your future tribe members. At other times, circumstances beyond your control will play a role in helping you connect with your tribe. If you look about you and discover that you are already allied with a wonderful and supportive tribe, remember that there are likely many members of your tribe you have not yet met. On the other hand, if you feel you are still living outside of your tribe, broadening your horizons can help you find your tribe members.
However your life develops after you come together with your tribe, you can be assured that its members will stand at your side. On the surface, your tribe may seem to be nothing more than a loose-knit group of friends and acquaintances to whom you ally yourself. Yet when you look deeper, you will discover that your tribe grounds you and provides you with a sense of community that ultimately fulfills many of your most basic human needs.
~Madisyn Taylor

THE HEART KNOWS BETTER
A “relationship” in this day and age can range from an acquaintance to a love affair, from kinship to friendship, from affinity to intimacy, from cognizance to conversance. From recognition to affection.
But the heart knows better than that.
The heart knows that there are many things that posture as relationships which, if put to the test, disappear like dew on summer grass. It’s what does not disappear when darkness comes that really affects our lives. Consistency, understanding, and fidelity distinguish a relationship from an association. It is those things of which a relationship is made.
The differences between them are, in the end, relatively easy to tell. Consistency, understanding, and fidelity are of the essence.
There is some degree of consistency that makes a relationship real. Good friends have a way of being there—not daily, perhaps, but certainly when life demands their presence most. When their presence alone can bring meaning to the moment, they are always there.
Only real friends can understand the depth of the pain and bring relief. They do not come as gawkers at a tragedy. They are at its center, bringing its balm, its comfort, its anodyne. It is understanding itself that divides the pain, makes grief possible. In front of my friend, there is no need to lie, to hold up like plastic on a stick, to press down the very emotion that is at this time the only proof of the life that’s left in us.
Finally, if the relationship is real, then fidelity itself will make the companionship that follows it through both darkness or light, pain or outrageous joy, possible. Relationship takes loneliness away, makes abandonment impossible, promises life in the midst of death because the heart and the strength of the other enables us to face it.
~Joan Chittister

ENCOURAGEMENT
One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement. When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold you might otherwise never have crossed on your own. There are times of great uncertainty in every life. Left alone at such a time you feel dishevelment and confusion. When a friend comes with words of encouragement, a light and lightness visit you and you begin to find the stairs and door out of the dark. The sense of encouragement you feel from the friend is not simply her words or gestures; it is rather her whole presence enfolding you and helping you find the concealed door. The encouraging presence manages to understand you and put herself in your shoes. There is no judgment but words of relief and release.

ON AMBIGUOUS LOSS

SHAME, HEALING AND TRANSFORMATION

THE HEART CROSSES THE ABYSS - Tara Brach

PANDEMICS

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
-- Arundhati Roy

SECRET ANNIVERSARIES OF THE HEART

The holiest of all holidays are those
kept by ourselves in silence and apart,
the secret anniversaries of the heart…
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

June is the month of secret anniversaries of the heart for me. Many June memories involved summer pastimes I enjoyed as a little girl— summer theater performed on the patio, the laughter of the adults along with the applause,, the splash of water at a pool or the gleeful dash through the sprinkler on the lawn. Followed in rapid succession by the indelible memories of June with my own child. Midsummer’s Night Eve and preparing a tea party for the fairies; then the excitement of running into the backyard the next morning and finding presents suspended in colorful netting and ribbons.
Secret anniversaries often reveal in mystical ways, our place in the world and our sacred connections. They can be joyful or sad or, surprisingly, both at the same time; major turning points or minor epiphanies. You might remember the day you got your first position after years of study, received a special love letter or sent your child off for his first overnight camp, as suddenly a sentimental potpourri of fresh air, pine needles, calamine lotion, roasted marshmallows and ghost stories around a blazing campfire overtakes you as you fold his beloved but ratty T-shirts from the dryer. He’s 30 now and just came for a visit, so where did that swoosh of memory come from?
Or you might recall a painful loss you can’t share with others; the due date of a baby who was never born, a long-standing breech with a friend; or a precious pet’s passing. Sometimes it takes long years to recognize the importance of such secret anniversaries—or to even know that you have one to acknowledge or commemorate with a silent pause and prayer, so that the past can move on with dignity. The Past asks only to be remembered. The Past wants us to move on more than the Present can ever imagine, because until it does, we can’t have the Future that’s waiting to unfold. The sacred contract and prime directive of the Past is to get you to your Future.
Our senses are the conduits of these soul memories. The song does remember when, as do the lilacs that bloomed every spring on your mother’s dressing table among the crystal bottles of fragrance and the soft light behind billowing organza curtains; the old baseball glove; the sheer ecstasy of the outside shower at your best friend’s beach house; Nana’s potato salad and the sour cherry pie from the farmer’s market. The cat collar, his favorite blanket, the kitchen junk drawer, the random Christmas ornament found behind the couch. These things matter—they are the soul’s touchstones of truth; memento mori (translated from the Latin “Remember that you will Die” but more importantly, “Remember to Live.”) It’s taken me my entire life to understand that we can’t receive the blessing or the bounty if we’re not willing to acknowledge the benediction hidden behind every letting go. If I can cut you a little slack from the cosmic curriculum to speed your journey, please tag along.
But secret anniversaries of the heart are ancient, primal pathways sent to lead us to make connections more powerful than we can even imagine.
Sometimes we dismiss the tugs of recollection as sentimental, unpractical or unimportant. Unruly. We often confuse the dormant with the dead; we’d like to be rid of painful memories and “move on” before the memories are ready to bid us adieu and depart on their own. But honoring the personal passages that altered the trajectory of our lives (especially if we are the only one who does remember) is how we grow, change and eventually heal. We find the strength to continue on our journey to Wholeness with morsels of our soul’s manna: remembrance.
~Sarah ban Breathnach

MEDITATION ON FINDING A REFUGE OF CALM

A MEDITATION ON KINDNESS

When you are in a crowd, look around at all the different people. Notice the clothes, faces, and their hair. Look at their gestures and movements, noticing if they are loose, stiff, or free. Just take it in, without judgment as if you were looking at a garden of people.
Then see them all as energy fields, the same as you. Just energy. As you continue watching, think to yourself: Every person here has had to live every day of their lives, just like me. They have to get up every day, decide what to wear, face loss, success, hurt, and shame, just like me. Everyone fell down while learning to walk, everyone probably felt anxious the first time they kissed, just like me. Each person has a story to tell. Some of the chapters are heroic. Some of them are about loss, some about fear, some about achievement or joy, just like my story. Then continue to think of them as energy, conceived of love, just like you.
When you say goodbye to someone or decide not to see them again, remember you are a moment in their story. Make it a story that doesn’t leave a scar.
~Charlotte Kasl
“Feelings are everywhere. Be gentle.“ ~J. Masai

PAIN
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they sense, when hate is gone they will have to deal with their pain.
~ James Baldwin

MEMORY
Is there a place where our vanished days secretly gather? I think there is. I believe the name of that place is memory. Memory to me is one of the great sources, one of the great treasure houses of wonder. You look at humans walking around on the streets, and houses, and churches, and in the fields, and you realize that each one of those creatures is carrying within herself or himself a whole harvest of lived experience. You can actually go back within yourself to the great things that have happened to you and enjoy them and allow them to shelter and bless you again. One of the negative aspects of contemporary life is that there is such disrespect for memory. Memory is now attributed to computers - but computers do not have memory – – they have hijacked the notion. Memory now seems to be focused almost exclusively on past woundedness and hurt, some of it induced, some of it real. It’s sad that people don’t use their good memories to revisit again and again the harvest of memory that is within them and live out of the riches of that harvest, rather than out of the poverty of their woundedness. Hegel, a philosopher I love, said ‘The wounds of the spirit heal and they leave no scars.” If we can somehow bring the difficult things within us into the realm and light of our souls, it is unbelievable the healing that will achieve itself in us. I think we are infinitely greater than our minds and we are infinitely more than our images of ourselves.
~John O’Donohue

CHOOSE ONE OF FIVE -Andrew Scott

HOW COULD ANYONE

LOVE
It is love that fashions us into the fullness of our being — not our looks, not our work, not our wants, not our achievements, not our parents, not our status, not our dreams. These are all fodder and filler, the navigating that fuels of our lives; but it is love: who we love, how we love, why we love, and that we love which ultimately shapes us.
It is love, before all and after all, in the beginning and in the end, that creates us. Today, remembering this, let yourself acknowledge and remember the moments, events, and people who bring you, even momentarily, into a true experience of love, and allow the rest, the inescapable mundanities of life, like a cloud, to very quietly drift away.
~Daphne Rose Kingma

PERCEPTION
Whenever we feel burdened and lost, or fragmented and bereft, the strength of our attention is a way back to feeling vital and alive. What this means is that as water will fill any holes, life force will fill us and animate us, if we can release our full attention. It doesn’t matter to what, just that we try one more time to be completely present and hold nothing back.
The oldest tools of presence are holding and listening. These are the instruments of attention that never seem to fail. When we can attend whatever is before us, we become immersed. And no one can be immersed without being brought alive.
There you have it. As far away as care might seem, we only have to cross the barrier of our weariness to begin again. Still, it can seem impossible when weighed down.
That’s when we need the attention of others, to be curious when we’re numb, to bring us water when we think we can’t drink, and to feed us wonder when we think there’s none left in the world. As a cut will heal, the strength of our attention will mend a cut in our outlook, if we give ourselves to life again.
– Mark Neppo

THE GREAT REALIZATION -YouTube

ADVICE ON LIVING A REWARDING LIFE
'Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches,
give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others…
re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul…”
~Walt Whitman

COURAGE
The real tests of courage are quiet. They are the inner tests, like remaining faithful when nobody's
looking, like enduring pain when the room is empty, like standing alone when you are misunderstood.

PRAYER
Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved, as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
And it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
~St. Francis of Assisi

IT’S OK
If we want a life that’s peaceful and productive, what do we need? We need the ability (which we learn slowly and unwillingly) to be with the experience of our life as it is. Most of the time I don’t want to do that, and I suspect that you don’t either. But that is what we are here to learn. And surprisingly, we are learning it. Almost everyone after meditating is happier. Maybe because it’s over, but it’s not just that. After meditating just a walk down the street is great. It wasn't great before meditating, but it’s great after meditating.This attitude may not last very long. Three days later we’re already searching for the next solution. Still we have learned a little about the error of this kind of search. The more we have experienced life in all its guises as being ok, the less we are motivated to turn away from it in illusionary search for perfection.
~Charlotte Joko Beck

MUSIC FOR HOPE

WHAT BRINGS YOU JOY?
It feels like a tough question to answer right now. As we enter another week directly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, it can be hard to sort out all the emotions we’ve been experiencing. There’s the communal grief, frustration, anxiety—and that’s just a few of the feelings we’ve felt. But amid all those emotions, you might have also had some moments of joy. A smile from a neighbor, a message of generosity towards essential workers, or a FaceTime or Zoom meeting with loved ones. Maybe it’s as simple as a warm mug of coffee or as big as your newfound ability to care for yourself. If savoring a moment of joy during the pandemic makes you feel guilty, you’re not alone. It can feel wrong to experience moments of happiness or humor right now. In a survey one of the top things people said they needed right now in the midst all this anxiety and frustration is moments of joy. Now more than ever, it’s important to find and savor those moments. They can get us through tough times, help us combat stress, and ultimately help us build resilience. This week, challenge yourself to notice the moments that make you smile. The things that make you feel good. The people that make you laugh. Give yourself permission to savor them, and know it’s OK to feel joy right now.

THE PROCLAMATION OF EASTER
O truly blessed night,
This is the night
of which it is written:
The night shall be as bright as day,
dazzling is the night for me,
and full of gladness.
The sanctifying power of this night
dispels wickedness, washes faults away,
restores innocence to the fallen,
and joy to mourners,
drives out hatred, fosters concord,
and brings down the mighty.
On this, your night of grace,
O holy Father,
accept this candle, a solemn offering,
the work of bees and of your servants’ hands,
an evening sacrifice of praise,
this gift from your most holy Church.
But now we know the praises of this pillar,
which glowing fire ignites for God's honor,
a fire into many flames divided,
yet never dimmed by sharing of its light,
for it is fed by melting wax,
drawn out by mother bees
to build a torch so precious.
O truly blessed night,
when things of heaven are wed
to those of earth,
and divine to the human.

HALLELUJAH THE EASTER VERSION

IN TIMES OF ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION
I pause (breathe in and out) and thank you for this day. For the challenges, the emotions, the struggle.
For in all this, I grow in strength and love.
I pause (breathe in and out) and ask that in the darkness, I see your light and in my fear, I feel your strength.
I pause (breathe in and out) and remember that today, as in days before, I have survived.
When I’ve wanted to run, I’ve stayed. When I wanted to hide, I’ve faced the day.
I pause (breathe in and out) and ask for forgiveness for the days I falter and the disease takes over.
I ask for compassion and love when I’m unable to give those to myself.
I pause (breathe in and out) and resolve to love myself more tomorrow. And always feel your spirit of love surrounding me in safety.
I pause (breathe in and out) and rest.

WHEN OUR WORLD FALLS APART
There are times when our whole world seems to be falling apart around us, and we are not sure what to hold onto anymore. Sometimes our relationships crumble and sometimes it's our physical environment. At other times, we can't put our finger on it, but we feel as if all the walls have fallen down around us and we are standing with nothing to lean on, exposed and vulnerable. These are the times in our lives when we are given an opportunity to see where we have established our sense of identity, safety, and well-being. And while it is perfectly natural and part of our process to locate our sense of self in externals, any time those external factors shift, we have an opportunity to rediscover and move closer to our core, which is the only truly safe place to call home.
The core of our being is not affected by the shifting winds of circumstance or subject to the cycles of change that govern physical reality. It is as steady and consistent as the sun, which is why the great mystics and mystical poets often reference the sun in their odes to the self. Like the sun, there are times when our core seems to be inaccessible to us, but this is just a misperception. We know that when the sun goes behind a cloud or sets for the night, it has not disappeared but is simply temporarily out of sight. In the same way, we can trust that our inner core is always shining brightly, even when we cannot quite see it.
We can cling to this core when things around us are falling apart, knowing that an inexhaustible light shines from within ourselves. Times of external darkness can be a great gift in that they provide an opportunity to remember this inner light that shines regardless of the circumstances of our lives. When our external lives begin to come back together, we are able to lean a bit more lightly on the structures we used to call home, knowing more clearly than ever that our true home is that bright sun shining in our core.
~Madisyn Taylor

THE TIME TO BE SLOW
“This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.
If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.”
~John O’Donahue

IN THE TIME OF PANDEMIC
And the people stayed home.
And they read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still.
And they listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.
And the people healed.
And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.
And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.
~Kitty O’Meara

HISTORY WILL REMEMBER
History will remember when the world stopped
And the flights stayed on the ground
And the cars parked in the street
And the trains didn’t run.
History will remember when the schools closed
and the children stayed indoors
And the medical staff walked towards the fire
And they didn’t run.
History will remember when the people sang
On their balconies, in isolation
But so very much together
In courage and song.
History will remember when the people fought
for their old and their weak
Protected the vulnerable
By doing nothing at all.
History will remember when the virus left
And the houses opened
And the people came out
And hugged and kissed
And started again.
Kinder than before.
~Donna Ashworth

WEEDS
Simply expressed, a weed is any plant that grows where it isn't wanted. Weeds are defined by their tendency to flourish at the expense of a gardener's overall vision, and we tend to battle their presence in our yards. It is interesting to consider, though, that a plant is a weed only within a certain context, which is to say that one person's weed is another person's wildflower. Most of us have pulled at least one dandelion up by its roots and disposed of it in the interest of preserving the look of a perfect green lawn, yet the dandelion is good medicine, packed with healing properties and vitamin-rich leaves that are a delicious, spicy surprise in a summer salad.
In the wild, there is no such thing as a weed because the overall vision is in the hands of Mother Nature, who accommodates and incorporates all forms of life. In nature, balance is achieved over the long term, without the aid, or interference, of a human supervisor. While one plant may prevail over others for a certain period of time, eventually it will reach an apex and then it will naturally decline, allowing for other forms to be born and survive. This self-regulating realm was the first garden of our ancestors, who learned the art of agriculture from studying the forests and fields of the as yet uncultivated earth. In a sense, weeds are harbingers of this wildness, pushing their way into our well-ordered plots, undermining more delicate flora, and flourishing in spite of us.
The next time you see a weed, you might want to look deeply into its roots, discover its name, its habits, and its possible uses. Instead of seeing an unwanted intruder, you might see a healer offering its leaves for a medicinal tea or its flowers for a colorful salad. At the very least, if you look long enough, you will see a messenger from the wilderness of Mother Earth, reminding you that, even in the most carefully controlled garden, she cannot be completely ruled out.

LOCKDOWN
Yes there is fear.
Yes there is isolation.
Yes there is panic buying.
Yes there is sickness.
Yes there is even death.
But, they say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise
You can hear the birds again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet
The sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear.
They say that in the streets of Assisi
People are singing to each other
across the empty squares,
keeping their windows open
so that those who are alone
may hear the sounds of family around them.
They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland
is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.
Today a young woman I know is busy spreading fliers with her number
through the neighbourhood so that the elders may have someone to call on.
Today Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples
are preparing to welcome and shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary.
All over the world people are slowing down and reflecting
All over the world people are looking at their neighbours in a new way
All over the world people are waking up to a new reality
To how big we really are.
To how little control we really have.
To what really matters.
To Love.
So we pray and we remember that
Yes there is fear.
But there does not have to be hate.
Yes there is isolation.
But there does not have to be loneliness.
Yes there is panic buying.
But there does not have to be meanness.
Yes there is sickness.
But there does not have to be disease of the soul.
Yes there is even death.
But there can always be a rebirth of love.
Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.
Today, breathe.
Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic
The birds are singing again.
The sky is clearing,
Spring is coming,
And we are always encompassed by Love.
Open the windows of your soul
And though you may not be able
to touch across the empty square,
Sing.
~ Fr Richard Hendrick, Ireland
March 13th 2020

HOLD THIS THOUGHT
You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken in the race of days.
– John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

HEALING
And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently. And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal. And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.
~Kitty O'Meara

PANDEMIC
What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath--
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love–
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.
–Lynn Ungar 3/11/20

PEACE BE WITH YOU - Shaina Noll - Songs for the Inner Child

SOUND HEALING
Everything in the universe is in a constant state of vibration, including our bodies. Sound is vibration that can be translated by the delicate structures of our inner ear, but it moves more than just those tiny receptors. It is part of the spectrum of energy vibrations that affect us on the mental, physical, and spiritual levels. Long ago shamans recognized the power of sound when they first used chants and drumming to heal people. In ancient Egypt, Greece, and India, the use of sound and music for healing was a highly developed sacred science. Sonic vibration has been one way of experiencing the energy of the universe for much of humanity's history.
When the vibrations of our physical and spiritual bodies are out of harmony it can cause disease. Sound healing gently massages the molecules back into the right places, clearing blockages and restoring harmony. Ancient healing systems such as Chinese medicine and Indian Ayurveda associate specific musical notes with subtle-energy systems of the body, such as in yoga where particular notes of music correspond to each of the seven chakras. In Tibet, priests have long used bells and bowls over and around the body to tune and clear the energy centers. Chimes and tuning forks are other tools that have been used to heal not only the body but the energy in a room as well.
Knowing that sound has the power to heal, we should also try to remember that sounds from modern life can have a negative affect. Choosing silence over discord may help us maintain a state of equilibrium. As we seek soothing and harmonizing sounds to surround us, we may be doing more than creating a balm for the noise of the world. We may actually be performing an act of self-healing that connects us with one of the most basic vibrations of the universe.

COMPASSION FOR IMPERFECTION
What if you could love yourself fully, including your imperfections? What if you could love others in the same way? You might fear that by loving your anger or laziness, your addictions or your anxiety, that you will never change for the better, that you will become more angry, lazy, addicted, or anxious. But if you experiment, you will see that what happens is often the opposite. As you love and accept yourself in a bigger, wiser love, your fear and aggression, your neediness and inertia, lose their hold. The wise heart brings compassion to imperfection itself. With mindfulness you can become the love you have sought. And with this love you are also returned to yourself.
Try it. Imagine you were to love yourself just as you are – with all these human flaws. Every human has imperfections; this is part of human incarnation. Your task is to see them clearly and love anyway. Now become the loving awareness that can witness and hold your life with its successes and imperfections in a sea of love. Who you are is not the flaws and trauma and fears. These are outer human struggles. You are timeless awareness, born with original beauty, the child of the spirit having a complicated human incarnation, like the other 7 billion of us.
With this deep acceptance and loving awareness, step out of the judge’s court. Invite yourself to become quiet, at ease with your whole self, kind and thoughtful. With this accepting presence you will see yourself make better choices – not out of shame or self-hate, but because your loving heart teaches you how to care. The loving heart transforms the whole human dance. After you practice embracing your imperfections, you can choose other people to include in this practice. See and accept all their imperfections with a profound loving awareness. Take your time. Notice how this acceptance changes your conflicts and feelings for the better. Other people are learners, just as you are. And when you envision loving them with all their flaws, notice how your loving gaze and care might inspire the best in them. As Nelson Mandela says, “It never hurts to see the good in someone. They often act the better because of it.”
Love yourself. This is the essence. Then take your very human imperfections and make beauty anyway.

SELF COMPASSION
Our brains are wired for survival and have a natural tendency, or negativity bias, to focus on and be motivated by negative thought patterns like criticism, pain, and danger.
Self-compassion helps us understand and transform these habitual responses, and develop the ability to motivate with ourselves and others with compassion rather than self-criticism.
The science shows – and through our practice we can see – that self-compassion has a significant positive impact on our well-being, resilience, and stress management.
Practicing self-compassion involves taking action and making positive changes in our lives, and through this process, we reconnecting with our deep motivation and excitement for helping others.

   •   When we use positive self talk as opposed to self criticism we have more energy and less depression
   •   Recognize when you criticize yourself and others and respond with kindness.
   •   Utilize compassion as a motivation rather than self-criticism.
   •   Apply strategies to transform difficult relationships or end them if necessary, as some people are incapable of practicing loving kindness.
   •   Develop an open heart and resilience through self-appreciation and integrate loving-kindness into your daily life.

METTA MEDITATION
May I be filled with loving kindness
May I be held in loving kindness
May I be free from inner and outer harm
May I be happy and contented
May I live with ease in the world.

​MEDITATION​ ​

MEDITATION ON FINDING A REFUGE OF CALM

A MEDITATION ON KINDNESS

MEDITATION