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Candy Paull
Kobo
Category:
Inspirational
Pages: 281
Copyright: Sept 6, 2013
Price: $6.99 (eBook)
Words of encouragement and inspirational quotes for difficult times. Sixty-one meditations offer motivation and support for daily living.
The Translucent Heart is a collection of sixty-one meditations and quotes for the spiritual journey, with practical ways to bring a little bit of heaven into daily life on earth. This devotional companion offers instant inspiration to illuminate the heart and lift your spirits. If some days feel opaque with weariness and struggle, discover a little bit of light to brighten your day.
We can make choices that welcome a more enlightened way of being which can make a positive difference in the way we live in an everyday world. The Translucent Heart offers devotional insights for more luminous living and awakening to our spiritual magnificence. Sixty-one meditations encourage the heart in the midst of stress and challenges, reminding you that your choices and attitudes can transform a day—and a life. From being kind to others to forgiving yourself, from loving an animal to loving the mystery, you’ll find reminders of divine goodness in this day, this time, and this place.
The Translucent Heart also includes a cornucopia of quotations to go with the meditations, showing that wisdom is universal, and people from different times, cultures, and spiritual traditions often agree on the essentials of what it means to cultivate the interior life.
The Translucent Heart brings inspiration for everyday living, helping you discover the true center of sweet serenity and peace that is already in your own heart. You’ll be reminded that there is more to life than meets the eye. Unseen spiritual dimensions are waiting to support you, helping you make the shift from fear and confusion to peace, harmony, and a growing sense of the beauty and potential that life has to offer. The Translucent Heart affirms that transcendence is our true nature. These devotional meditations will help you reflect on the something deeper, more luminous and abiding, that illumines the common clay of earthly existence.
Meditations include:
Listen to Your Inner Guidance System
Create Space for a More Authentic Life
Discover the Wisdom of Playfulness
Listen to Your Body
Overcome Fear with Love
Nurture a Childlike Heart
Create a Circle of Giving
Center Your Heart and Mind in Meditation
Make Peace with Imperfection
Discover the Sacred in the Ordinary
Practice the Art of Contentment
Bless the Dark Night of the Soul
Cultivate Tranquility in the Midst of Chaos
Be Open to the Great Mystery
Live Each Moment as a Blessing
Words of Encouragement | Words of Inspiration | Words of Gratitude
Excerpt
54. See Your Life as a Sacred Journey
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made…They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures—and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space but inwards as well.
Lawrence Durrell
We step out into life and do not know where it will take us. Yet we can look back and see how God led us step by step. Life is a journey, a sacred pilgrimage through unknown territory. You can choose to make this life a pilgrimage of faith and trust. You can proclaim, “I may not know where I’m going, but I know Who is going with me.” Like those who have traveled the pilgrim’s path, you can walk with the Divine Presence every day.
See your life as a sacred journey, traveled by faith. Think of the passages that we all go through. Childhood, marriage, parenthood, celebrations, sorrows—all are milestones marking your sacred journey through life. These personal journeys take us not only across time and space, but also through epochs in our lives.
Think about the great adventure of childhood, when you became aware of yourself and then discovered the world beyond the family home. Remember adolescence, when you awkwardly began to reach out for adulthood. The first time to live away from home, searching for a place to belong in the working world, finding compatible social circles, the commitment to a marriage, starting a family and watching your own children begin their own life journeys, letting go of aging parents as they move toward the great mystery beyond this life—all of these are stages in life’s journey and pilgrimages in and of themselves.
Life pushes us out of the comfortable and familiar into new adventures. Just when you think you’re settled in, something sets you off in a new direction. A crisis may make you re-evaluate your life and reinvent yourself. A tragedy or loss can push you to create a life without someone or something you thought would always be there. Situations change, priorities shift, and suddenly you find yourself a wandering pilgrim once again, learning new lessons about faith and trust.
Saying “yes” to marriage, raising a family, making a move to another town, deciding to learn a new skill, giving yourself permission to pursue a dream, returning to school, taking a trip to a long dreamed of destination—all of these are journeys that can be taken with a pilgrim heart. Expect to be changed. Ask yourself this question: If my life is a journey, where am I on that journey? Know that at the end of the journey you will be a different person than the one who began the pilgrimage.
I think of my life and the lives of everyone who has ever lived, or will ever live, not just as journeys through time, but as sacred journeys.
Frederick Buechner
• Think of your life as a map, marked by the milestones along the way. Where are you on your sacred journey?
In the spiritual journey we travel though the night toward the day. We walk not in the bright sunshine of total certainty but through the darkness of ignorance, error, muddle, and uncertainty. We make progress in the journey as we grow in faith.
Christopher Bryant
The path followed by those engaged in the spiritual life is long and arduous, but their work can be summarized in a few words: instead of allowing their lower, instinctual, animal nature to get the upper hand, keeping them enslaved and forever excluded from paradise, they work to give the spirit a voice, to submit to its laws, so that the powers of eternity may come to reign within them.
Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
Every man has two journeys to make through life. There is the outer journey, with its various incidents and the milestones.… There is also an inner journey, a spiritual Odyssey, with a secret history of its own.
William Ralph Inge
Pilgrims are persons in motion—passing through territories not their own—seeking something we might call completion, or perhaps the word clarity will do as well, a goal to which only the spirit’s compass points the way.
Richard R. Niebuhr
If your journey is indeed a pilgrimage, a soulful journey, it will be rigorous. Ancient wisdom suggests if you aren’t trembling as you approach the sacred, it isn’t the real thing. The sacred, in its various guises as holy ground, art, or knowledge, evokes emotion and commotion.
Phil Cousineau
For in their hearts doth Nature stir them so,
Then people long on pilgrimage to go,
And palmers to be seeking foreign strands,
To distant shrines renowned in sundry lands.
Geoffrey Chaucer
You cannot travel the path until you have become the path.
Buddha
59. Trust the Process
A wise man does not try to hurry history. Many wars have been avoided by patience and many have been precipitated by reckless haste.
Adlai E. Stevenson
In a society focused on results and end products, it is easy to forget that you can’t create without going through a process of creation. You may say you have a certain goal or end result in mind, but often the actual work may take you in another direction. And many times a seemingly messy detour becomes the path to something unexpected and wonderful.
Sometimes the process includes unexpected time out. That time out may be a business setback that plunges you into deep waters as you work to survive and pay your bills. A layoff or hiring freeze means that the bright career plans are put on hold. The collapse of the music industry or tremendous changes in the book industry can mean that even successful writers and performers find themselves without a livelihood, having to reinvent not only their careers, but who they are and how to offer their gifts in a chaotic marketplace. Sometimes it’s a family emergency, and you may find yourself in the role of caretaker, putting your own life on hold while you walk with a loved one through the valley of the shadow of death. It might be a mistake you or someone else made, a change in market conditions, an unexpected emergency or health crisis. It could even be as simple as a creative project that didn’t come out the way you hoped, leaving you wondering whether you should try to salvage it or start all over again.
The process may include your own illness. You have to respect the process of the illness itself, allowing your body to do the work of healing in its own time and way. Being sick is an opportunity to learn a few lessons. You learn the lesson that you are not indispensable. The world does not stop because you are ill. It goes on without you. Yet when you are well again, you usually discover that the world has room for you to return and become part of the great wheel of life. All the plans you made were good and important, but not so important that you can’t take time to heal. This enforced time out offers an opportunity to reevaluate your life. It reminds you that you need to take care of yourself. It is also an opportunity to hear from God in a fresh way, learning that ultimately the Divine is in charge of your life.
Take it one day at a time. Instead of trying to second guess the future, look at what you have right now. What can be accomplished today? Concentrate only on what you are able to do today. Do what you can and let go of trying to control the outcome. All you can do is do your best and leave the rest up to God. In most of the important things in life, we are dependent on the nature of creation and time, the grace of the Life Force flowing in us and carrying us through the events and processes of living.
In the larger perspective of life, eternal lessons teach us that trust and patience are required for the things that are really important. It takes time to raise a child, write a book, nurture a relationship, grow a career, and create a community. Think of a farmer patiently waiting for seed, soil, sun, and rain to do their work. The field must be plowed, the seed sown, the land fertilized and watered, the soil weeded, and the crop tended before it comes to full fruition. So it is with us.
Trusting the process is a form of letting go. You can try to predict and control life, but life is larger and more gloriously complex than the calculating planning part of the human mind can comprehend. When some plan or project is on hold, trust that it, too, is part of the process. It has been said that we make our plans—and God laughs. So why not laugh along? Or at least stop resisting and open your mind to receive new insights.
Trust that the goodness of life itself will lead you if you keep going. Trust the process of its unfolding. When a butterfly is working its way out of its cocoon, it is no kindness to cut the cocoon to make emergence easier. The struggle itself is an essential part of the process. When a human hand interferes with the process, the butterfly’s wings are undeveloped. It cannot fly. It dies. When the butterfly’s struggle is done in nature’s time, the emergence may last longer than our impatient hearts can stand. But when the butterfly finally emerges from this birthwork, it spreads its wings to dry, and then flies into its destiny. When you are stressed because your own process seems to be one of struggle and delay, remember the butterfly. Trust that a greater process is happening, that all this is working together for your good and your growth.
Whether you are creating a work of art or a life, trust the process. Let go of your expectations and let what you are doing lead you from one step to another. Love the moment and know that it, too, is part of the process. Do your best and leave the results to God.
• Do a creative project, such as building model airplanes or knitting, and watch the process unfold. Meditate on the processes unfolding in your life.
We must become hospitable to change. If we do not, then just as today is like yesterday, every tomorrow will be like today. The price tag for what you want is hospitality. Pay it, and all the grace in the universe is yours.
Darshani Dean
Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.
Benjamin Disraeli
The future belongs to him who knows how to wait.
Russian proverb
Life on the farm is a school of patience; you can’t hurry the crops or make an ox in two days.
Henri Fournier Alain
I find that it is not the circumstances in which we are placed, but the spirit in which we face them, that constitutes our comfort.
Elizabeth T. King
Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.
Chuang Tzu
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might have been.
William Hazlitt
But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
George Eliot
The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
Carl Jung
The chief pang of most trials is not so much the actual suffering itself as our own spirit of resistance to it.
Jean Nicholas Grau
Teach us, O Lord, the disciplines of patience, for to wait is often harder than to work.
Peter Marshall
Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
On every level of life from housework to the heights of prayer, in all judgment and all efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are the sure marks of an amateur.
Evelyn Underhill
Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars.
Henry Van Dyke
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven.
Ecclesiastes 3:1 (NIV)
Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.
Leo Tolstoy
What you and I become in the end will be just more and more of what we are deciding and trying to be right now.
John Powell
One must put all the happiness one can into each moment.
Edith Wharton
Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Who would think that those branches would turn green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Impatience will get you nowhere, fast. If you insist on being in a hurry, you'll move very quickly—and often get nowhere. Take a breath. Relax. Find your peace. Don't require the Universe to move more rapidly than it is. It is actually working perfectly, and it will prove that to you if you will give it a chance.
Neale Donald Walsh
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