Our Sangha this week was a rich community experience filled with meaningful meditation, the sharing of our collective wisdom and a closing meditation vibrating love to friends that are struggling with illness.
We enjoyed two readings from Anam Cara, A Book of Centic Wisdom, by John O'Donohue. If you haven't read this book, we encourage you to put it on your list.
During our group sharing we expressed the understanding that as human beings, loving ourselves is a great challenge because we get so caught in the ideas of good and bad which leave us with regret, self hatred, and self doubt.
The readings and meditations from the evening provided us with a deeper understanding of ourselves and reminded us of the natural cycle within us from dark to light, from human to divine. It is in our acceptance of both dark and light that we find truth, love, and compassion.
The energy of the evening provided us with the inspiration to live in gratitude for the events that continuously unfold in our lives.
May we all be blessed with the ability to give love and to receive love - the natural cycle of our being.
The Celtic Circle of Belonging (link to the reading below)
May we all be blessed with the ability to give love and to receive love - the natural cycle of our being.
The Celtic Circle of Belonging (link to the reading below)
The Human Heart is Never Completely Born
Though the human body is complete in one moment, the birth of the human heart is an ongoing process. It is being birthed in every experience of your life. Everything that happen to you has the potential to deepen you. It brings to birth within you new territories of the heart. Patrick Kavanagh capture this sense of the benediction of happening: "Praise, praise, praise / The way it happened and the way it is". In the Christian tradition one of the most beautiful sacraments is baptism. It includes a special anointing of the baby's heart. Baptism comes from the Jewish tradition. For the Jewish people, the heart is the center of all the emotions. The heart is anointed as a main organ of the baby's hearth but also as the place where all its feelings will nest. The prayer intends that the new child will never become trapped, caught or entangled in false inner networks of negativity, resentment, or destruction toward itself. The blessings also intend that the child will have a fluency of feeling in its life, that its feelings may flow freely and c arry its soul out to the woprld and gather from the world delight and peace.
Against the infinity of the cosmos the silent depths of nature, the human face shines out as the icon of intimacy. It is her, in this icon of human presence, that divinity in creation comes nearest to itself. The human face is the icon of creation. Each person also has an inner face, which is always sensed but never seen. The heart is the inner face of your life. The human journey strives to make this inner face beautiful. It is here that love gathers within you. Love is absolutely vital for a human life. .......Once a soul awakens, the search begins and you can never to back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in teh lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent. ......When this spiritual path opens, you can bring an incredible generosity to the world and to the lives of others. Sometimes, it is easy to be generours outward, to give and give and give and yet remain ungenerous to yourself. You lose the balance of your soul if you do not learn to take care of yourself. You need to be generous to yourself in order to receive the love that surrounds you....
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