LOSS
Everything is meant to be lost, that the soul may stand in unhampered nothingness.
— Meister Eckhart
Archive for the 'quote of the day' Category
Quote of the day: LOSS
February 24, 2011Quote of the day: LOVE
February 13, 2011LOVE
Love is experienced differently by each of us, but for most of us five aspects of love stand out. We feel loved when we receive attention, acceptance, appreciation, and affection, and when we are allowed the freedom to live in accord with our own deepest needs and wishes. These “five A’s” meet us in different guises throughout life’s journey. In childhood, we need these five A’s to develop self-esteem and a healthy ego. They are building blocks of identity, of a coherent human personality. Human experience has a striking and reliable harmony: what we need for the building of a self is also precisely what we need for happiness in our adult love relationships. Intimacy, at its best, means giving and receiving the five A’s, the joys and wealth of relationship. These five elements or aspects of love also describe our destiny of service to the world as mature spiritual beings. Great spiritual exemplars such as Jesus or Buddha can be seen as beings who offer this fivefold love to all of us. Through our spiritual practice we come to know a power greater than our ego, and that power nourishes us by granting us the graces of attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing.
— David Richo
Quote of the day: PEOPLE-PLEASING
February 9, 2011PEOPLE-PLEASING
I tried so hard to please that I never realized no one was watching.
— Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Quote of the day: PERFECTIONISM
February 2, 2011PERFECTIONISM
We know we are not integrating the full spectrum of our feelings when we keep reducing them all to a single judgment. For example, “I am emotionally stuck,” may also mean: “I am depressed and grieving and self-pitying and refusing to self-activate.” Or “I am a loving father” may need to be expanded to “I am a loving father in many ways and there are also times when I am controlling and put my own expectations ahead of my children’s needs.”
Noticing when we disregard the full spectrum of our feelings and behavior and then acknowledging our missing predicates may enrich our sense of our own depth! “From now on, every time I judge myself (or others), I will use the technique of adding four more adjectives that are also somehow true!”
Acknowledge openly to others that sometimes you succeed and sometimes you fail; sometimes you come through for them and sometimes you let them down. You offer to come through for someone just one more time than you let someone down. You offer not perfection but commitment to make amends for failures, to make restitution for losses. This is a flexible (and therefore adult) presentation of your self. It preserves you from the expectation by others that you can be counted on absolutely, or the verdict of others that you be discounted absolutely. “To live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often,” as Cardinal Newman so wisely remarked. It would be a great violation of humanness to be rigidly perfect in conduct. The repressive vigilance such white-knuckling requires does not signify an achievement but a self-defacement.
— David Richo, How to Be an Adult
Quote of the day: VIRUS
January 30, 2011VIRUS
Like snakes, viruses have a reputation as malevolent, poisonous, and deadly. In fact, most snakes are harmless, and dangerous viruses are rare. In order to inflict serious harm, a virus has to clear several biological hurdles. First, it has to remain unrecognized by the human immune system – to evade any protective antibodies. The virus would also need to make human sick. (Most do not.) Finally, it would have to spread efficiently – for example, through coughing, sneezing, or shaking hands. Many viruses fulfill one of these criteria; some fulfill two; far fewer meet all three.
— Michael Specter, “The Doomsday Strain,” in The New Yorker
another eye opens 