Some picture quotes ... 0146

Begin The New Year With A New Hope ...

Do not begin the new year by recounting to yourself or others all your losses and sorrows. Let the past go.

The new year will give you the fabric for a fresh start in life; why dwell upon the events of the past!

It is your mind which makes your body sick. Let the spirit assert itself and demand health, hope and happiness in this new year.

Forget the money you have lost, the mistakes you have made, the injuries you have received, the disappointments you have experienced.

Real sorrow, the sorrow which comes from the death of dear ones, you need not forget. But think of these things as sent to enrich your nature, and to make you more human and sympathetic. You are missing them if you permit yourself instead to grow sad and irritable.

Do not tell me you are too old. Age is all imagination. Ignore years and they will ignore you.

Be alive, from head to toe. Breathe deeply, filling every cell of the lungs for at least five minutes, morning, noon and night, and when you draw in long full breaths, believe you are inhaling health, wisdom and success.

Anticipate good health. If it does not come at once, consider it a mere temporary delay, and continue to expect it.

Regard any physical ailment as a passing inconvenience, no more. Never for an instant believe you are permanently ill or disabled.

Think of yourself as on the threshold of unparalleled success. A whole clear glorious year lies before you! In a year you can regain health, fortune, and happiness!

Push on!

A Happy Soul ...

A Happy Soul ...

• A Happy Soul stops trying to change others, but instead focus on changing self.
• A Happy Soul is one who accepts people for who they are.
• A Happy Soul is one who understands that everyone is right in one's own perspective.
• A Happy Soul is one who learns to "let go".
• A "Happy Soul is one who is able to drop expectations from every relationship and gives for the sake of giving.
• A Happy Soul is one who understands that whatever we do, we do it for our own peace.
• A Happy Soul is one who stops proving to the world, how intelligent one is.
• A Happy Soul is one who does not seek approval from others.
• A Happy Soul is one who stops comparing with others.
• A Happy Soul is one who is at peace with oneself.
• A Happy Soul is one who is able to differentiate between "need" and "want" and is able to let go of one's wants.
• A Happy Soul is one who stops attaching "happiness" to material things.

Organic Gift

Organic Gift - Parker Palmer

 

Years ago, I heard Dorothy Day speak. Founder of the Catholic Worker movement, her long-term commitment to living among the poor on New York's Lower East Side - had made her one of my heroes. So it came as a great shock when in the middle of her talk, I heard her start to ruminate about the "ungrateful poor."

 

I did not understand how such a dismissive phrase could come from the lips of a saint - until it hit me with the force of a Zen koan. Dorothy Day was saying, "Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only impoverish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward."

 

When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless - a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other's need to be cared for. That kind of giving is not only loveless and faithless, based on the arrogant and mistaken notion that God has no way of channeling love to the other except through me. Yes, we are created in and for community, to be there, in love, for one another. But community cuts both ways: when we reach the limits of our own capacity to love, community means trusting that someone else will be available to the person in need.

 

One sign that I am violating my own nature in the name of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess - the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have; it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.

 

May Sarton, in her poem "Now I Become Myself," uses images from the natural world to describe a different kind of giving, grounded in a different way of being, a way that results not in burnout but in fecundity and abundance:

 

As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root...

 

When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself - and me - even as I give it away. Only when I give something that does not grow within me do I deplete myself and harm the other as well, for only harm can come from a gift that is forced, inorganic, unreal.

About the Author: Excerpted from Parker Palmer's book "Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation"