Meeting #3: April 7, 2020
Meeting Theme:
Acceptance is a felt experience. Lacking acceptance one feels anxiety, even dread. With acceptance comes comfort of mind and ease of body. For acceptance to take hold, one must consent to life’s difficulties, then practice generosity of spirit. Only then can one fully accept life on life’s terms.
Quotes of the Day:
As soon as we accept life’s most terrifying dreadfulness, at the risk of perishing from it…then an intuition of blessedness will open up for us…Whoever does not, sometime or other, give their full and joyous consent to the dreadfulness of life can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choices are to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant, and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.
David Whyte
Meditation: Breath and Body Awareness, then “Let It Go” from the Focus 5 Cards
Open Forum for Discussion
Meeting Recording:
Meeting #4: April 9, 2020
Meeting Theme:
We are on “God’s retreat.” Accept the need to be slow. Doubt will arise; don’t allow it to rule you, instead honor its integrity. Seek opportunities to be generous, perhaps through lovingkindness. Promise, the activity of hope, remains, and new beginnings will ensue.
Quotes of the Day:
This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.
If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.
From “To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings” by John O’Donohue,
Meditation: Lovingkindness
Meeting Recording:
James M. Walsh Pastoral Counseling 