"The art of letting things happen, action in non-action, letting go of oneself, as taught by Meister Eckhart, became a key for me by which I was able to open the door to the “Way”. The key is this: we must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us this becomes a real art of which few people know anything. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, and never leaving the simple growth of the psychic processes in peace."

C.G. Jung (commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 90.)

"The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door."

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés

For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past

For everything under the sun there is a time. 

This is the season of your awkward harvesting, 

When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,  

Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a place 

You had forgotten you knew from the inside out; 

And a time when that bitter tree was planted  

That has grown always invisibly beside you 

And whose branches your awakened hands 

Now long to disentangle from your heart.  

You are coming to see how your looking often darkened 

When you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love, 

How deep down your eyes were always owned by something  

That faced them through a dark fester of thorns 

Converting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong; 

You could only see what touched you as already torn.  

Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning. 

And your memory is ready to show you everything, 

Having waited all these years for you to return and know.  

Only you know where the casket of pain is interred.  

You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering 

And according to your readiness, everything will open.   

May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide 

Who can accompany you through the fear and grief 

Until your heart has wept its way to your true self.  

As your tears fall over that wounded place, 

May they wash away your hurt and free your heart. 

May your forgiveness still the hunger of the wound  

So that for the first time you can walk away from that place,  

Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed, 

And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.

~ John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

"Either you walk inside your story and own it OR you stand outside your story and hustle for your unworthiness." 

~ Brené Brown

"Before we strive after perfection, we ought to be able to live the ordinary man without self-mutilation. As for instance the ordinary physician neither imagines nor hopes to make of his patient an ideal athlete, so the psychological doctor does not dream of being able to produce saints."

~ C.G. Jung, Letters Vol. II, p. 474.

“I cannot prove to you that God exists, but my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern in the individual has at its disposal the greatest transforming energies of which life is capable. Find this pattern in your own individual self and life is transformed.”

~ C. G. Jung, Letter to Lauerens van der Post.

There is a voice inside of you
That whispers all day long,
“I feel this is right for me,
I know that this is wrong.”
No teacher, preacher, parent, friend
Or wise man can decide
What’s right for you – just listen to
The voice that speaks inside.

– The Voice

#shelsilverstein

#symbol #archetypes #tarot #jung

'If you are willing to look at another person's behavior toward you as a reflection of the state of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person, then you will, over a period of time cease to react at all." 

~ Yogi Bhajan
 

INTERBEING                                                

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we ha vea new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And wesee the wheat. We now the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here-time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.

Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without “non-paper elements,” like mind, logger, sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

From: The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra                          

IN THE WORLD

In the strange, early evening half-light we sit.

In the cloudiness of our questioning, we sit.

In our madness and our clarity, we sit.

In the midst of too much to do, we sit.

In the warm arms of our shared sorrow, we sit.

In community and in loneliness, we sit.

In sweet exhaustion, we sit.

In the blazing energy of being alive, we sit.

Here with the singing coyotes and the crows,

With each electric bird song

And the rippling breeze and the dry grasses,

Here with the cobwebs and the moon

And the muddy and dusty road upon us...

Us in the sound,

And the sound in us.

Us in the world,

And the world in us.

~ Brigid Lowry

#meditation #poetry