‘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
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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 April 2021
The dying leaves of a hundred million autumns have built up the humus from which our crops spring…… A hard, polished acorn falls to the ground and cracks open, but it sends one shoot down and another up, and later there is a tree. Life springs and grows where the bearers of life do not clutch it to themselves, but hear the call to let it go in the interests of fuller life and action.
Maria Boulding.
Thought for New Year
‘Yearning for a new way will not produce it. Only ending the old way can do that. You cannot hold onto the old, all the while declaring that you want something new. The old will defy the new; the old will deny the new; the old will decry the new. There is only one way to bring in the new. you must make room for it.’ Neale Donald Walsch
Thought for December 2020
‘A community is a place where people can express individuality rather than individualism. Individualism is simply doing your own thing in your own way and blanking out the other people. Individuality involves bringing your particular contribution to bear on the life of the community, even if that is a difficult contribution for others to accept.’ Christopher Jamison
Thought for November 2020
‘Keep in mind the advantage of remaining aware of death, of hugging its shadow to you. Such awareness can integrate the darkness with your spark of life and enhance your life while you still have it. The way to value life, the way to feel compassion for others, the way to love anything with greatest depth is to be aware that these experiences are destined to be lost.’ Irvin Yalom
Thought for October 2020
‘Most of us recognise impermanence at an intellectual level. But we still become upset when one of our possessions breaks, when a relationship ends, or when we notice that we are growing older. We act – and in our heart of hearts we think – as though all things were unchangeable and permanent. And the tension created by trying to maintain an attitude which is so profoundly at odds with reality introduces a jarring and irritating quality into our everyday experience, because the real world is constantly slapping us in the face whenever it fails to match up to our illusions.’ Chris Pauling
Thought for September 2020
‘If we are safe and nurtured enough to develop our capacity to wonder, we start to wonder about the people in our lives……their thoughts and experiences, their pain and joy, their wants and needs. We begin to sense that they are to themselves as vast and complex as we are to ourselves, their inner world as infinite as our own.’ Richard Rohr
Thought for August 2020
‘The imagination is the creative force in the individual. It works on the threshold that runs between light and dark, visible and invisible, quest and question, possibility and fact. The imagination is the great friend of possibility. Where the imagination is awake and alive, fact never hardens or closes but remains open, inviting you to new thresholds of possibility and creativity.’ John O’Donohue
Thought for July 2020
‘Uncertainty is fearful to the ego, which always wants to control reality, but from the viewpoint of detachment, a constantly shifting and changing universe must remain uncertain. If things were certain, there could be no creativity. Therefore spirit works through surprises and unexpected outcomes.
We achieve peace of mind only when we accept the wisdom of uncertainty.’ Deepak Chopra
