go not to temple

Go not to the temple
to put flowers upon
the feet of God,
First fill your own
house with the
Fragrance of Love....
Go not to the temple
to light the candles before
the altar of God,
First remove the
darkness of sin
from your heart....
Go not to the temple
to bow down your
head in prayer,
First learn to bow
in humility before
your fellowmen...
Go not to the temple
to pray on bended knees,
First bend down
to lift someone who
is downtrodden.....
Go not to the temple
to ask for forgiveness
for your sins,
First forgive from your
heart those who have
sinned against you.

Nothing is forever, including the pain of loss

After experiencing a devastating loss, if you’ve allowed yourself to feel the legitimate pain it’s brought and not sought to avoid feeling it, things slowly start to improve. We wake one morning to find there’s something in the day we’re actually looking forward to; or someone says something funny and we actually laugh; or we find ourselves able to plan things again, even if only a trip to the grocery store. But there’s no definite timetable for this.

Stuck in grief, unable to move on.

Sometimes this happens because we actually become reluctant to surrender our grief even after it’s run its proper course, believing the pain of loss is the only thing keeping us connected to our loved one, or that to feel happy again would be to diminish the significance of the relationship we once enjoyed. But neither is true. Even when people we love die, our relationships with them do not. We continue to have feelings about them, memories of things they did, imaginings of things they might say were they with us now. Just because the pain of losing them diminishes with time, their importance to us need not. Normal grief is like a roller coaster: there are ups and downs, moments of pain intermixed with relief.

Why do we suffer when we lose those we love?

I think the true answer is because we believe we can’t be happy without them. And yet I often think the only reason the pain of loss abates at all is that we do become convinced we can start living life with a new perspective, be normal and happy again—just slowly and unevenly.

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange i am ungrateful to those teachers.

Spiritual Nugget

In spiritual life there is no room for compromise. Awakening is not negotiable; we cannot bargain to hold on to things that please us while relinquishing things that do not matter to us. A lukewarm yearning for awakening is not enough to sustain us through the difficulties involved in letting go. It is important to understand that anything that can be lost was never truly ours, anything that we deeply cling to imprisons us.

Time is a great healer

Suffering with time remains no longer a tragedy. It becomes the fuel that molds us into better human being.