Category: Spirituality

How good it is to center down!  
To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by! 
The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic; 
Our spirits resound with clashings, with noisy silences,  
While something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still  
    moment and the resting lull.… 
The questions persist: what are we doing with our lives?— 
    what are the motives that order our days?  
What is the end of our doings? Where are we trying to go?… 
Over and over the questions beat in upon the waiting moment.  
As we listen, floating up through all the jangling echoes  
    of our turbulence, there is a sound of another kind— 
A deeper note which only the stillness of the heart  
    makes clear.  
It moves directly to the core of our being. Our questions are  
    answered,  
Our spirits refreshed, and we move back into the traffic of  
    our daily round 
With the peace of the Eternal in our step.  
How good it is to center down!

— Howard Thurman

Here’s brilliant writing from Richard Rohr and shared in the Daily Meditation, “The Departure and the Return,” for today. I’ve been sensing this for years now:

We are created with an inner drive and necessity that sends all of us looking for our True Self, our true home, whether we know it or not. This journey is a spiral and never a straight line. There is a God-size hole in all of us, waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy. We dare not try to fill our souls and minds with numbing addictions, diversionary tactics, or mindless distractions. The disguise of evil is much more superficiality and willful ignorance than the usually listed ‘hot sins.’ God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything… Once we touch upon the Real, there is an inner insistence that the Real, if it is the Real, has to be forever…. In other words, heaven/union/love/home now emerge from within us, much more than from a mere belief system or any belonging system, which largely remain on the outside of the self.

— Richard Rohr

To me, this is also why most churches/religions FAIL to bring people to God even though that’s supposedly why they exist. They become caught up in dogma/belief or socializing or service to the community. Not that those things are necessarily bad. It’s just that they can so easily become distractions from our real goal: a true experience of God which then fuels our existence and service in this world.

We are meant to become love in this world. True spirituality makes us more inclusive, understanding, and compassionate toward all suffering everywhere in the world.

“If there is the slightest feeling of boredom, irritation, or lack in meditation or prayer, it is because we have left the eternal now and followed thought into the past or future.”

— Rupert Spira, The Heart of Prayer, p. 91

I love this quote because it reminds me I already have everything that’s needed in the present moment: There is peace, love, joy, fullness right here when I’m truly paying attention. The mind is never satisfied, is always seeking something other than the present moment – as if happiness could be found “out there” somewhere. But Yoga (“union”) reminds us we’re already One, already complete as is. All we need to do is recognize this Truth and enjoy it. Then live and love!