‘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
Blog
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
‘we sense that something is missing in our lives and search the world for it, not understanding that what is missing is us.’ Parker J Palmer
Thought for November 2022
’Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.’ Rollo May
Thought for October 2022
’The compassion you have for yourself is the greatest gift you can give to others’ Judith Lasater
Thought for August 2022
’The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty and frustrating life gets.’ Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks.
Thought for July 2022
On Friendship
‘When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that is is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.’
Henri Nouwen
Thought for June 2022
‘If only it were so simple. If only there were evil people somewhere in cities committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Thought for May 2022
‘Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it‘ Rumi
Thought for April 2022
‘We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.’
Pema Chödrön
Thought for March 2022
‘According to Bruce Tift, ”Sanity is a counter-instinctual process.” And at first, it certainly feels counter-instinctual to turn towards what is painful and terrifying. Shouldn’t I be running in the opposite direction? But the counter-instinctual move turns out to be tremendously empowering. If we can face our worst fears, then maybe they won’t continue to secretly run our life. And where does real confidence come from if not from knowing that we can handle whatever experience comes our way?’ Tami Simon
Thought for february 2022
‘To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.’
Pema Chödrön
Susannah Izzard Psychotherapy 