Mindful Wisdom 04

Welcome to the fourth mindful words of wisdom (wow) series. I am thankful for the University of Minnesota’s Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing. Nine months IN since my first involvement last May for Mindful Mondays (former Stress Busters). Now I am in full wings of my deeper calling with the Divine and dive IN even deeper to where there is nothing I’ve ever known. May we stay hopeful, may we be free from pains and suffering, may we be blessed by God’s grace all along…

• “In a real sense all life is interrelated.  All [people] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly… I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

• “To believe what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue the disbelief in the dignity of [people].” – Mahatma Gandhi

• “We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” – Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

• “What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

•  “I hope you’ve all been able to keep up a meditation practice. Your meditation seat offers a place of repose in the swirl of events—or we could say you become a mountain resting, unshakeable, in both sunshine and fierce storms. Of course, our meditations are often filled with busyness and chaotic thoughts—that’s the human mind—but the practice opens up the possibility for the wind and waves to die down and the ocean of mind to settle.” – Erik Storlie

• “Meditation is in service {of life} rather than an end in itself. Sometimes we lose sight of that because meditation can be sought as a refuge or escape from life. Actually it’s a training to support living with presence, awareness and compassion. It can also be understood as a training in intention. Living intentionally is what mindfulness is all about.” – Lila Kate Wheeler

• “Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.” – Jelaluddin Rumi, The Essential Rumi

• “The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing…” – St. Francis and the Sow by Galway Kinnell – Excerpt from the poem

• “Some believe that it is only great power that can hold evil in check. But that is not what I’ve found. I’ve found it is the small things. Every day deeds by ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.” – Gandalf, The Hobbit

Credit: University of Minnesota’s Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing.