A Light I Am

"A Light I Am" - Meditation Prayer
Music by: Fran McKendree

~

"When man releases
the God spark
within
he makes all things new.

This is when he begins to see
beauty
instead of ugliness,
love
instead of hate,
releasing health
instead of sickness.

The world becomes fresh and new
just as the rain cleanses.

~

Feel the infinite Love,
the infinite power
flowing
into
you.

Recognise
the glorious colours and lights
that surround you,
then you will be
conscious
of a self
which is limitless"


Quotes from: "Gift from an Angel" by Eileen Goble

Who Am I?

"The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, person and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications.

None of these is you."


~ Eckhart Tolle


Source: The Power of Now : A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Page: 37

Being Nothing Special

Kindness

"Whenever you have the choice
between
being right and being kind...
just choose kind"

~ Wayne Dyer ~

Always Enough

To Be Alive Is The Greatest Miracle

These beautiful words come from

Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh...

"One thing at a time, do it deeply. There are many wonders of life available in the here and the now, and without mindfulness we would not know how to profit from them. It is like my eyes. Breathing in, I am aware of my eyes; breathing out, I smile to my eyes. That is an exercise: mindfulness of eyes, smiling to eyes. When you embrace your eyes with your mindfulness you recognize that you have eyes, still in good condition. You need only to open them to enter the paradise of colors and forms.

Sit on the grass and just open your eyes. The blue sky is for you. The white clouds are for you, the trees, the children, the grass, and the loving face of your beloved one. We may think that everything in us goes wrong, but that is not true. There are millions of things in us that have not gone wrong, yet we only place our attention on what goes wrong. That is not wisdom.

The orange is sweet. If you eat the orange in forgetfulness, being caught in your anxiety and sorrow, the orange is not really there. But if you bring your mind and body back together, produce your true presence, and begin to peel the orange, you will see that the orange is a miracle. I have conducted orange meditation sessions where we spent half an hour just eating an orange. And if you can bring the elements of stability and freedom and concentration into it, then eating an orange is a wonderful thing to do. It may be the most important thing to do with your life.

Peel the orange. Smell it. Look at the orange to see the orange blossoms, and the rain and the sun that have gone through the orange blossoms. The orange tree has taken several months to bring this wonder to you. If you don’t have mindfulness, the orange is not something precious; you are not really there, so the orange is not really there. When you are truly there, fully alive, you will become a miracle yourself. In fact, you are no less than a miracle. To be alive, to be still alive, and to be there, is the greatest miracle. But without mindfulness we cannot touch that miracle, and we continue to complain. If you are there, the orange will be there too, and the contact between the two brings true life. Just put a section of the orange into your mouth, close your mouth mindfully, and with mindfulness feel the juice coming out of the orange. Do you have the time to do so? What are you using your time for? Are we using our time to live, or to worry or make plans?"

The New Age Contemplative

This abridged excerpt comes from "A New Earth" by Eckhart Tolle...

"The outward movement into form does not express itself with equal intensity in all people. Some feel a strong urge to build, create, become involved, achieve, make an impact upon the world....

...Others, after the natural expansion that comes with growing up has run its course, lead an outwardly unremarkable, seemingly more passive and relatively uneventful existence.

They are more inward looking by nature, and for them the outward movement into form is minimal. They would rather return home than go out. They have no desire to get strongly involved in or change the world. If they have any ambitions, they usually don't go beyond finding something to do that gives them a degree of independence. Some of them find it hard to fit into this world. Some are lucky enough to find a protective niche where they can lead a relatively sheltered life, a job that provides them with a regular income or a small business of their own. Some may feel drawn toward living in a spiritual community or monastery. Others may become dropouts and live on the margins of a society they feel they have little in common with. Some turn to drugs because they find living in this world too painful. Others eventually become healers or spiritual teachers, that is to say, teachers of Being.

In past ages, they would probably been called contemplatives. There is no place for them, it seems, in our contemporary civilization. On the arising new earth, however, their role is just as vital as that of the creators, the doers, the reformers. Their function is to anchor the frequency of the new consciousness on this planet. I call them the frequency-holders. They are here to generate consciousness through the activities of daily life, through their interactions with others as through "just being".

In this way, they endow the seemingly insignificant with profound meaning. Their task is to bring spacious stillness into this world by being absolutely present in whatever they do. There is consciousness and therefore quality in what they do, even the simplest task. Their purpose is to do everything in a sacred manner. As each human being is an integral part of the collective human consciousness, they affect the world much more deeply than is visible on the surface of their lives."

Gratefulness

"Ordinary happiness depends on happenstance. Joy is that extraordinary happiness that is independent of what happens to us. Good luck can make us happy, but it cannot give us lasting joy. The root of joy is gratefulness. We tend to misunderstand the link between joy and gratefulness. We notice that joyful people are grateful and suppose that they are grateful for their joy. But the reverse is true: their joy springs from gratefulness. If one has all the good luck in the world, but takes it for granted, it will not give one joy. Yet even bad luck will give joy to those who manage to be grateful for it. We hold the key to lasting happiness in our own hands. For it is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful." - Brother David Steindl-Rast

Non-Gossip

This wise and wonderful piece comes from Inner Frontier ...


So much of what we say concerns people who are not there to participate in the conversation. And so much of that, perhaps subtly, judges, criticizes, maligns or generally puts down the person spoken about. We know this as harmful gossip or talking behind someone’s back. Sounds ugly, and it is. Yet we engage in this behavior all too often.

If we could see how much harm this does us by feeding our egoism and by feeding our destructive self-criticism, we would stop immediately. When we speak, or even think, in a personally judgmental, faultfinding, disapproving, blaming or disparaging manner, it strengthens the side of us that seeks to diminish other people and, by comparison, build our own ego. The unfortunate result is a wall of isolation around us. Furthermore, the judging mind readily turns to self-judgment: we love and accept neither other people nor ourselves. Compassion weakens as we harden our hearts in such negative gossip.

Fortunately, the converse also holds true: refraining from harmful gossip helps free our heart and mind to be more accepting and kind toward ourselves and others.

For this week, notice your intention when you talk about someone. Are your words critical or harmful? Do your comments distance you from the person commented upon? Whenever possible, extend this noticing to your judgmental thoughts about others.

The Simplicity of Wonder

"God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason." - Dag Hammarskjold




This inspirational article comes from Wide Awake Living ...


The Simplicity of Wonder
by Alice Gardner

One of the things that our minds do all the time is to decide what is important enough for us to notice and what is not. If we didn't discriminate with our perception, we would get overwhelmed with too much information, so our minds are habituated to helpfully sort the wheat from the chaff, so that we notice what it important to us and not the rest.

The trouble with the whole system is that mind (if its running the show) thinks what really matters is anything that is a threat, and what doesn't matter are the things that don't change. Things that change and move and have drama get our attention, while the simple unmoving true nature of the people and things around us are not deemed to be worthy of our attention. Mind is just trying to be helpful, but without the influence of our true Self, no wonder we are having a hard time staying calm!

If we can notice this process at work we are well on our way to opening our perception out of its habitual narrowness. We can now intentionally put a portion of our attention on that which doesn't change, even while mind is being riled up about something. We are then open to the incredible peace that radiates from the world that is really here, behind all the thinking.

Wonder is the best word that I can think of to describe the way to apprehend the world behind thought—the world as it is before we think about it. To meet the world with wonder is to become like little children. This is the way an innocent child will perceive things for the first time. With the eyes of wonder we see without preconceived ideas that would cause us to no longer notice what is there (and only relate to the labels that we give things). We don't pretend that we know all about what we see. We just see. We just feel. We just know and are known directly and simply.

This is an experience of utter simplicity. It is an experience of just being Here and whatever we are perceiving being Here too. As we look around, we meet the world just as it is, without labeling it, comparing it, or deciding whether we like it the way it is or not. We meet the simple cup we drink from, the computer in front of us, or the tree outside our window with the wonder of being open to what they are, to what is there and simply being there with them. We meet our own selves the same way. We let it all be here with us, just as it is, and we allow the thought-based world that had shrouded it from our view to become the thing that is barely worthy of our notice.

The Mindful Channel

Have you ever sat silently in your lounge room and at gazed in wonder and awe at the box shaped contraption sitting quietly in the corner?

It really is an amazing invention that many of us take for granted.

When people ask me about such things as the meaning of life, the existence of God, and how the Universe works...I just point at that box and reply..."How would I know? I'm still having trouble understanding how television works!"

TV has gotten a bad name over the years...

Mindful viewing, however, can be a very enlightening experience!


As Eckhart Tolle writes in his book "A New Earth"...


"There are some programs that have been extremely helpful to many people; have changed their lives for the better, opened their heart, made them more conscious.

Even some comedy shows, although they may be about nothing in particular, can be unintentionally spiritual by showing a caricature version of human folly and the ego.

They teach us not to take anything too seriously, to approach life in a lighthearted way, and above all, they teach by making us laugh.

Laughter is extraordinarily liberating as well as healing."


I eliminate the negative side of TV by pre-recording shows I like and fast-forwarding through the ads. I also play my favourite sitcoms from DVD so as to avoid advertising altogether.

This is my way of adapting the medium of television so that it is always tuned to my favourite channel...

The Mindful Channel.

Presence Creates No History

This piece has been adpated from a story from Anthony De Mello's "The Prayer of the Frog"...

"There once lived a person so godly that even the angels rejoiced at the sight of them. But, in spite of their great holiness, they had no notion that they were holy. They just went about their humdrum tasks diffusing goodness the way flowers unselfconsciously diffuse their fragrance and street-lamps their glow.

Their holiness lay in this - that they forgot each person's past and looked at them as they were now, and they looked beyond each person's appearance to the very centre of their being where they were innocent and blameless and too ignorant to know what they were doing. Thus they loved and forgave everyone they met - and they saw nothing extraordinary in this for it was the result of their way of looking at people.

One day an angel said to them, "I have been sent to you by God. Ask for anything you wish and it will be given to you. Would you wish to have the gift of healing?" "No," they replied, "I'd rather God did the healing himself."

"Would you want to bring the sinners back to the path of righteousness?" "No," they said, "it is not for me to touch human hearts. That is the work of angels." "Would you like to be such a model of virtue that people will be drawn to imitate you?" "No," they said, "for that would make me the centre of attention."

"What then do you wish for?" asked the angel. "The grace of God," was their reply. "Having that, I have all I desire." "No, you must ask for some miracle," said the angel, "or one will be forced on you."

"Well, then I shall ask for this: let good be done through me without my being aware of it."

So it was decreed that the holy person's shadow would be endowed with healing properties whenever it fell behind them. So everywhere their shadow fell - provided they had their back to it - the sick were healed, the land became fertile, fountains sprang to life and color returned to the faces of those who were weighed down by life's sorrow.

But the person knew nothing of this because the attention of people was so centred on the shadow that they forgot about the person and so their wish that good be done through them and they forgotten was abundantly fulfilled."

Live a Heartfelt Life

Realising Our Full Potential

In a world where images, achievements and the history we create, are often used to evaluate the degree to which we have realised our potential...it is enlightening to remember these words (adapated from an original quote by Chuang-tzu.)

They paint a very different picture of what our world could look like once our full potential is realised...


"In the age when life on earth was full, no one paid any special attention to worthy people, nor did they single out the person of ability. Rulers were simply the highest branches on the trees and the people were like deer in the woods. They were honest and righteous without realizing that they were "doing their duty". They loved each other, and did not know that this was "love of neighbor". They deceived no one but did not know they were "people to be trusted". They were reliable and did not know that this was "good faith". They lived freely together giving and taking and did not know they were generous. For this reason, their deeds have not been narrated. They made no history."


This quote has been adapted from a quote from Chuang-tzu which appears in the book "Soul Food" – by Jack Kornfield & Kristina Feldman from a chapter entitled "Here and Now: Simplicity with What Is".