Finding Stillness

08/04/2023

This morning's moment. To those who celebrate it,Happy Easter.🌞

21/03/2023

Came to share lunch by the lake today

05/05/2022

Rhanks to Jack Kornfield

Cartoon: David Sipress 😃
Often when people start to practice , they hope to become calm and peaceful. Usually they are in for a big shock. Initially practice can reveal the opposite, bringing an unseen stream of evaluations and judgments into stark relief. As minutes pass, we may cycle between agitation and boredom. We hear a door slam and wish for quiet. ("I'm meditating—it should be quiet!") Our knees hurt, our back hurts, and we try to avoid the pain. (Maybe we need a better cushion?) We can't feel our breath and get frustrated. We notice our mind won't stop planning and we feel like a failure. ("I can't stop thinking!") Then maybe we notice how many judgments there are, and we feel proud of ourselves for noticing, then judge our pride.
We can begin to put aside our judgment. We can become mindful. When we are mindful, it is as if we can bow to our experience without judgment or expectation. “Mindfulness,” declared the Buddha, “is all helpful.”

Excerpt adapted from "The Wise Heart"

18/08/2019

04/02/2019

♥ lis

02/02/2019

😀

12/01/2019

Shower mindfulness and visualisation..😉

01/01/2019

Happy New Year everyone.. 😄

27/12/2018

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it 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 J.M. Nouwen, The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey
Peace and Love to all - Jeff ♥

05/09/2018

03/09/2018

Cartoon: David Sipress

16/08/2018

Being mindfully present, aware, as we listen, is fostering understanding and communication.

"Most people do not listen with the intent to understand;
they listen with the intent to reply.
They're either speaking or preparing to speak.
They're filtering everything through their own paradigms,
reading their autobiography into other people's lives."
Stephen Covey

Center for Building a Culture of Empathy and Compassion
http://facebook.com/EmpathyCenter

07/08/2018

Some some daily mindfulness moments

Once your students have been trained in mindfulness, they may enjoy picking up these one of these activity cards to encourage more mindfulness during the day:

21/06/2018

Not all of us are aged yet, but we all shall be. The TSElliot quote is one of my favourites and needs no age to limit it.

RETURN TO YOURSELF

Stillness is vital to the world of the soul. If as you age you become more still, you will discover that stillness can be a great companion. The fragments of your life will have time to unify, and the places where your soul-shelter is wounded or broken will have time to knit and heal. You will be able to return to yourself. In this stillness, you will engage your soul. Many people miss out on themselves completely as they journey through life. They know others, they know places, they know skills, they know their work, but tragically, they do not know themselves at all. Aging can be a lovely time of ripening when you actually meet yourself, indeed maybe for the first time. There are beautiful lines from T. S. Eliot that say:

'And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.'

John O'Donohue
Excerpt from ANAM CARA

Ballyvaughan / Co. Clare
Photo: © Ann Cahill

16/04/2018

More often than not I think and the quiet voice can be heard so clearly in the stillness of meditation