‘What we need is to spend more time and give more awareness to deepening our sense of connection with the magic and love and creative energy of life. This does not happen just inside formal spiritual situations, but happens all the time in many different ways. We can open our hearts and expand our benevolent awareness in all circumstances.’ William Bloom
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Thought for March 2021
‘To confuse your physical body with your self is a recipe for misery. For though our bodies are miracles, they are ageing, faltering, fragile, collapsing, vulnerable, disintegrating miracles. To ally ourselves with them is as wise as leaping onto a bus as it heads towards the cliff edge. Our physical bodies are not the future, and therefore they cannot be our present either. They are not us. We live with them as best we can, and for some that is a good deal easier than for others. But we never imagine that they define us or contain us.’ Simon Parke
Thought for February 2021
‘Why try to start by changing the problem? Why not begin sometimes by changing our reaction to the problem?’ Christophe André
Thought for December 2023
I hope you’ve enjoyed the previous quotes and poems I’ve posted here. This will be the last ‘Thought for the Month’ that I will offer.
If you would grow by Daniel F. Mead
If you would grow to your best self
Be patient, not demanding
Accepting, not condemning
Nurturing, not withholding
Self-marveling, not belittling
Gently guiding, not pushing and punishing
For you are more sensitive than you know
Mankind is as tough as war yet delicate as flowers
We can endure agonies but we open fully only to warmth and light
And our need to grow is as fragile as a fragrance dispersed by storms of will
To return only when those storm are still
So, accept, respect, and attend your sensitivity
A flower cannot be opened with a hammer.
Thought for November 2023
‘Allow’ by Danna Faulds
There is no controlling life.
Try corralling a lightning bolt,
containing a tornado.
Dam a stream and it will create a new channel.
Resist, and the tide will sweep you off your feet.
Allow, and grace will carry you to higher ground.
The only safety lies in letting it all in –
the wild and the weak; fear, fantasies, failures and success.
When loss rips off the doors of the heart, or
sadness veils your vision with despair,
Practice becomes simply bearing the truth.
In the choice to let go of your known way of being,
the whole world is revealed to your new eyes.
Thought for October 2023
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that.The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” Pema Chodron; Things Fall Apart
Thought for September 2023
The Guest House, by Rumi
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
Who violently sweep your house
Empty of its furniture,
Still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
For some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
Meet them at the door laughing,
And invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
Because each has been sent
As a guide from beyond.
Thought for August 2023
‘When we finally know we are dying and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.’
Sogyal Rinpoche ‘The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’
Thought for July 2023
For we must be clear that to live or love only where we can trust, where there is security or containment, where one cannot be hurt or let down, where what is pledged in words is forever binding, means really to be out of harm’s way and so to be out of real life. James Hillman
Thought for June 2023
‘It is possible to have a good state of mind while we simultaneously feel very disturbed. It’s possible to feel grief or rage or anxiety and to have these difficult experiences arise within a type of well-being that is not dependent on positive thoughts or emotions. …. It’s having a new relationship with our disturbance that offers the potential for transformative change.’ Bruce Tift
Thought for May 2023
‘Psychological problems move in the direction of healing only when we can relate to them in a spacious way, from the space of our being. When we try to fix our problems directly, we usually pit one side of ourselves against another, and this creates inner stress and pressure which only contract our space…… When we can give our experience space in which to be, with awareness, the jam in our mind starts to clear up and the traffic has room to move freely once again. We may not have fixed the problem, but we have found a larger space in which to hold the problems. This is how true healing occurs.’ John Welwood
Thought for April 2023
‘Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of our courage……There is no courage without vulnerability. Courage requires the willingness to lean into uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.’ Brené Brown
Thought for March 2023
‘It’s only human to find other people annoying. It happens to all of us….. I’m happy to tell you there’s a solution to the problem. If you want someone to be easy to deal with, to behave in a way you find tolerable, there’s really only one way: learn to like them exactly as they are. Because, when has anyone…ever become more like someone else thought they ought to be, simply because that person walked around judging them?’ Bjorn Natthiko Lindeblad
Susannah Izzard Yoga 