Prayers, Quotes

Loving Kindness: A Prayer for Hope & Healing (Morning Prayer) …

missawn

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Rumi

Go to the place inside that hurts. The part that’s lonely or sad. Your broken heart. Your bruised ego. The part of you that worries it will always be this way. Go there now and silently repeat:

May you be happy.
May you be safe.
May you be filled with love.
You’re not alone.
— Jason Garner from And I Breathed, My Journey from a Life of Matter to a Life That Matters

The Beauty and The Frailty

We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender. Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty.
— John O’Donohue from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

Choose Joy

Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us …

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
— Maria Popova from Essential Life-Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face,
Hello, you who make the morning
And spread it over the fields
And into the faces of the tulips
And the nodding morning glories,
And into the windows of, even, the miserable and the crotchety –
Best preacher that ever was,
Dear star, that just happens,
To be wherea you are in the universe
To keep us from ever-darkness,
To ease us with warm touching,
To hold us in the great hands of light-
Good morning, good morning, good morning
Watch now, how I start the day
In happiness, in kindness.
— Mary Oliver from Devotions

Loving-Kindness Meditation

OPENING CHANT
May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.
May they be free from suffering and the root of suffering.
May they not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering.
May they dwell in the great equanimity, free from passion, aggression, and prejudice.

CLOSING CHANT
And now as long as space endures,
And as long as there are beings to be found,
May I continue, likewise, to remain
To drive away the sorrows of the world.
— Pema Chödrön from Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change

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