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Every day Jesus would follow the same rhythm: withdraw for solitude, but then come back to engage by healing, feeding, caring, welcoming, binding up the wounds of this world, and implanting in people a vision of resilience, engaging with a world on fire.
—Brian McLaren
—Brian McLaren
Sofer recommends beginning with the grounding practice of attention.
Unraveling the hurt we carry and finding our place in a world on fire start wherever we are. Directing attention begins to train the heart. Like a green shoot breaking through concrete, attention cracks the façade of the past so we are not prisoners of our habits or the programming of culture.…
Contemplative practice is one powerful way to reclaim attention. Rest your attention with an anchor, a home base for meditation such as the breath, a sensation, an image, a sound, or a mantra. An anchor is a primary meditation object to help steady your attention and limit mind-wandering, like an anchor for a ship.… This mental action—recognizing that attention has wandered and then consciously redirecting it—strengthens your capacity to pay attention and develops a host of other skillful qualities, including patience, kindness, and concentration.…
The more you cultivate this quality of attention, the more you build inner resources. I am not encouraging you to avoid the painful realities of life and look only at what’s uplifting. The idea here is to strengthen your capacity to choose what you attend to. Then—when you turn to face pain, distress, and hardship—instead of feeling helpless or demoralized, you will have more energy, confidence, and clarity to meet the challenge.
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One of the chief characteristics of true bhakti or devotion is that our love for the world and worldly things keeps getting less and less. Whenever we find that in spite of following the spiritual path our attachment is not getting less, our love for the phenomenal world is not decreasing, we should know that there is something seriously wrong with our spiritual practice. Sri Ramakrishna pointed out that vairagya, or renunciation, means ‘dispassion for the world and love for God’.
You must cultivate more and more the tendency to associate only with good people, with people who are pure minded, for if you do not consciously avoid impure company, you will be unable to destroy the evil or impure tendencies in your own mind. All impure men and women with whom you associate awaken in you — in a very subtle way — your impure thoughts, either in the form of desire or in the form of disgust, and disgust is only desire with a negative sign. There are many people who say that one must experience all the different experiences of life oneself. But, how do you know what experience you have already had in your previous lives? If you really want to pass through all experiences yourself, then your mind will be so weak and full of ruts in the end that nothing will be possible in spiritual life. In that case you would merely want to offer your dirt and filth to God.
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People often find nice theories to justify their own worldly conduct. We turn sceptics because it is comfortable for us to be sceptics, because it justifies our own conduct to some extent. As a result of
your worldly conduct your body becomes diseased, your mind weakened, no energy is left for spiritual practices, and what spiritual path could be followed with such a worthless body and such a worthless mind? No, this theory of experience is out and out wrong, because very few find their way to spiritual life in this manner. The others become diseased in body and mind and can never regain their energies in this life. Besides, how can you pass through all experiences of life yourself?
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When you handle a flower to smell it, you press it; then it becomes rotten. And then you dare to
offer it to God. If you want to offer body and mind to God, why not do it now? Why offer them when
they have become tainted and diseased?
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“The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect.”― Peter A. Levine
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“The greater our attachment to that which is outside of ourselves, the greater is our overall level of fear and vulnerability to loss.”― David R. Hawkins
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…a person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.” ― Carl R. Rogers
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NOT VOICE OF MIND , HEARER OF MIND - WITCON
“There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind - you are the one who hears it.”― Michael A. Singer
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