Each person who enters our life, every experience we have, is a teacher. Some things we learn amaze us, some trouble us. Everyone we have loved has become a part of us ... And no relationship created in love can ever die.
Each person who enters our life, every experience we have, is a teacher. Some things we learn amaze us, some trouble us. Everyone we have loved has become a part of us ... And no relationship created in love can ever die.
Blessing offers us a personal consciousness-raising practice, a spiritual adventure bringing sensitivity and gratitude into the foreground of our lives. While we all have moments when a blessing rises spontaneously to our lips, the path of blessing can become a way of life. Through the practice of blessing we develop an ever-deepening receptivity to the abundant love and joy flowing through creation. We learn to accept that love, absorb it into our souls, and offer it back to the Source with joy. In this way we come to feel the Presence of God move within us and through us.
Stillness is tranquility of the inner life, the quiet at the depths of its hidden stream. Stillness is a collected, total presence, a being all there, receptive, alert, ready.
Stillness is not a technique, but rather a lifestyle which arises from a personal commitment to take up citizenship in the internal world and a willingness to pay attention to the age-old question, "Who am I?" The best tool we have to begin this inward journey is the breath. As we begin to reclaim our birthright of a deep, smooth, even, diaphragmatic breath, the physical feeling of stillness begins to touch both the body and mind. The more we embrace a lifestyle of stillness, the less time we spend being tossed by the wind.
To concentrate without effort,
to transform work into play,
I must be still and hold
a zone of Silence in my soul.
The silence of the storm dominated everything. There are no words to describe a quiet so potent. I knew the snow was echoing a stillness that exists, hidden, in everything. I do not understand how I suddenly knew this, but the knowledge filled me. I saw that this stillness generates all life. And sitting there in the snow, I wept at the profound sound and power of that silence. It was hard to witness its beauty, knowing I'd lived many years never suspecting it was there.
To return back into ourselves, there are three things needed, for which you don't require a computer, television or radio: the first is a bit of stillness. Nothing can happen without a certain stillness. We also need silence. There is nothing so vocal and articulate as silence; all good language, all great words, are born of it. And the third thing we need is solitude. We need to acknowledge that solitude is an invitation to the soul to come alive. Solitude is utterly luminous if we lose our fears and begin to enter it more deeply.
In stillness we add a grace and a benediction to our lives. For a short period, through a daily practice, we choose to create an interval where we are in communication with Spirit. In this holy stillness we find the deep peace we most need and want in our lives. To be still with the attention in the heart ... all other things are beside the point.
My greatest wealth is the deep
stillness
in which I strive and grow
and win what the world cannot take
from me with fire or sword.
I will be still, and let the earth
be still with me. And in that
stillness find the Peace of God,
that dwells within my heart.
... the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence we call God ...
It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins;
that calls us out over our own fathoms.
What to do, but to draw a little nearer
to such ubiquity by remaining still?
Be still and empty
God shall fill you
with far greater fullness
than you could ever
wish or will.
Everyday at dawn and often throughout the day, I go back to the quiet place where my inner Voice strengthens and infuses my speaking voice. Whether my work is with troubled teens who fight at my city's local high school or with rebels in the Philippines, I go to my inner Voice for refuge and support. If I hear, "Be still and know I am God," then, I know that I am centered and ready for partnership with the Spirit.
As long as the soul is not still there can be no vision, but when stillness has brought us into the presence of God, then another sort of silence, much more absolute, intervenes: the silence of a soul that is not only still and recollected but which is overawed in an act of worship by God's presence.
I saw Nuri sitting in meditation so motionless that not even one hair moved. I asked,
"From whom did you learn such deep meditation?"
"I learned it from a cat waiting by a mouse hole.
The cat was much stiller than I.
When you slow yourself down and emanate peaceful, tranquil thoughts, you actually send the anxiety and stress out of your life. Similarly, when you meditate you bring God's silent love into your present moments. In silence and stillness God's energy will become yours. By slowing your mind and other thoughts, you allow the fastest vibrations of spirit to enter. That faster vibration is one of harmony, love, and peace.
Each of us can live a life of amazing power and peace and serenity ... if we really want to — a life in which our competing selves within are integrated. This happens through surrendering everything to attend to the Holy Within, the Voice, the Whisper, the Life in us all: steadfastly direct your mind and thought to peace throughout the day with your normal activities.
Learn to be quiet in the midst of turmoil,
for quietness is the end of strife and this
is the journey to peace.
May harmony live
in the hearts of all people.
May peace be their way,
May we all be kind and gentle,
our paths straight and true.
May Star Beings show the way
and dark clouds never stay.
May life thrive upon the land,
and peace dwell in
the hearts of humankind.
The Way is everything. It's not a particular direction or a special way of doing something; it's a circle with no outside and no inside, just the pulsating of life everywhere. It excludes nothing. Therefore, as peacemakers working in the world, we exclude nothing. We'll pick and choose according to what's appropriate for us at a certain place and a certain moment. But we won't be attached to what we choose, for everything is the Way.
Sisters and brothers: We direct to your minds that peace is not merely the absence of war, but the constant effort to maintain harmonious existence between all peoples, from individual to individual, and between humans and the other beings of this planet. We point out to you that a spiritual consciousness is the path of survival of humankind.
A deep peace descended such as I had never felt before. My whole past, words, tears, everything sank into it. The only thing that remained was the here and now, transparent to light and to God... There was neither barrier nor distance between God and the world. Lying on the grass, I felt Love within me and I was filled with light, peace, and gratitude.
Love is our shared truth.
Peace is our eternal hope.
PEACE
comes within human souls
when they realize their
relationship, their oneness,
with the universe
and all its powers,
and when they realize that
at the center of the universe
dwells the Great Creator
whose Center
is really everywhere
within each of us.
Peace is not absence of strife.
Peace is acceptance
and surrender to that which is.
Peace is the profound awareness of
the one true source
from which all things emerge . . .
and to which all things return.
Peace cannot be achieved through violence,
It can only be attained through understanding.
Ultimately we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.
Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth. They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, when they have a Treasure within that not only includes all those things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.
We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the sermon on the mount.
O Blessed Peacemaker, You invite us to return, to rest in You; for, in the Silence, we become strong; with utter trust, our way is made sure.
By the power of your Love, we pray: Enter our hearts to your Indwelling Presence. As we are still we come to know You.
Beloved of our hearts united with All, blessed are You,
O true Life of our lives: Lumen Christi . . . Holy Wisdom.
Social change must start in our hearts: peace and prayer open our hearts. People who practice spiritual disciplines have the most enduring impact on life because the inward work we do makes us more effective in any situation. We are most effective when we can return good will for ill will and show kindness to those who would harm us; when we look for a common solution without anger or a desire for retaliation; and act on principles of care and concern without a need for reciprocation.
Daily silence experienced in humility and fervor is an indispensable exercise in spiritual nourishment and gradually creates within us a permanent state of silence. The soul discovers in such silence unsuspected possibilities. It realizes that life can be lived at different levels.
When we make a place for silence, we make room for ourselves. By making room for silence, we resist the forces of the world which tell us to live an advertised life of surface appearances, instead of a discovered life — a life lived in contact with our senses, our feelings, our deepest thoughts and values.
At the heart of each of us,
whatever our imperfections,
there exists a silent pulse of perfect rhythm,
a complex form of wave forms and resonances,
which is absolutely individual and unique,
and yet which connects us
to everything in the universe.
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
stand shadowless like silence, listening to silence.
We are familiar with the space in meditation and prayer where we sit in deep silence, attentive and awake, listening within the darkness. Yet we can also live in this state of deep receptivity, relying on what we hear inside our hearts in all aspects of our lives. This is what is needed of us now: to allow the divine to flow into the world and awaken us all within the oneness and joy of That which is at once both infinite within the silence of our own hearts, and visible in the sparkling moments of light and love that are creation.
I sit on the front porch of our cabin and "listen" to the complete silence. It's so quiet that when a bird flies past, I can hear the air passing beneath its wings. Gradually I become one with the silence and my heart opens to the joy of life. During the winter, when we don't live at the cabin, I visualize sitting on that porch as a way to "stop" the hustle and bustle of my day-to-day world.
There is a tender sense of silence, without prayer to or from. In the moments of our own silence we are welcomed, as both stranger and friend. We need to allow this presence to be with us, not in defined moments, but as a flow. The river is here, not hidden behind the bank or crossing the horizon. In the tranquility of the moment there is no moment, nothing defined or captured. This world is seeped with the other, soaked with the dew of timelessness.
Out of the oasis of silence can we drink deeply from our inner cup of wisdom.
Sometimes there would be a rush of noisy visitors and the silence of the monastery would be shattered. This would upset the monks; not the Master who seemed just as content with the noise as with the silence. To those protesting he said one day, "Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self. "
Golden lace.
sunrise pours slantwise
into clear water
through the blue spruce,
the deep tangle of pine
and purled woodsmoke.
I turned
and the earth hushed.
While I leaned into silence
a morning too vast to fathom
filled with light.
I have long imagined that at some point in the process of creation there must have come a point of stillness and silence after all the chaotic churning and gurgling of lava and rain. In my visioning eye I see this first moment of silence, almost as if I had been there, and the spirit of the mist is there, hovering.
Spiritual growth is achieved with passion, difficulty, and intensity as much as it is achieved by peace, silence, and love.
Our being is silent, but our existence is noisy. Yet when our noisy actions stop, there is a ground of silence always there. Contemplatives must be in contact with that ground and communicate from that level to keep silence alive for other people.