Tag: spirituality
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Causes and conditions…
It’s Brigid’s weekend over here in Ireland. Whether one celebrates the Saint or the Goddess, it doesn’t matter. She’s definitely within the collective conscious. There has been much talk about putting scarves out on her eve so that they can be blessed and imbued with her healing powers for the year ahead. As well, the…
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Trust Emergence
There is a beautiful poem by John O’ Donohue called “Fluent”. It is not long. It’s simply: I would love to live Like a river flows, Carried by the surprise Of its own unfolding. I can still remember the first time I heard these lines. I was with a gang of fellow mindfulness practitioners on…
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Christmas tree lights…
My mom and my brother arrived this past weekend for the Christmas season. There was a lightness in my step, as I left the house to travel up to the airport. However, there was also a sense of needing to ‘get through’ the first week of visits as I am smack dap in the middle…
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Embracing the dark
Up here in the Northern hemisphere, we are officially in the darkest days of the year. The birds at my feeder seem hungrier, there is ice on my windscreen and the pale, silvery winter sun casts warm hues on the tops of buildings, requiring us to look up a bit more. These can be hard…
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The peace within
I am just home from a personal retreat in Donegal, where I spent 3 days dropping down into practice. It was just what I needed: reconnection. Reconnection to a deepening of meditation, to my dear friends and colleagues who joined me, to the land of Donegal and to that part of myself that is never…
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Strong roots
I have been planting trees. Apple and hazelnut trees. All this tree planting feels brand new and I have been doing my very best to make sure that these trees are getting the care that they need. I can not tell you how many times I have been in to the local garden centre asking…
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What’s your intention?
There’s a chair that I move around my garden. Sometimes it sits next to the Rowan tree that Graeme planted, other times it sits next to my blackcurrant bush, and this week it has been sitting underneath the tree that has been shedding leaves. The chair acts as a reminder for an intention I have…
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The practice of not knowing
The older I get the less comfortable I am with assumptions and presumptions. I mean, they are not inherently bad, but they can get things wrong and they often lead me astray. In fact, just a few months ago I had assumed that my mother would feel confident in a room full of new people.…
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The right side of the bed
I would say that the Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh was my first mindfulness teacher. Now, I have never actually met him. I did see him once from a distance, (at an event), when he came over to Ireland in 2012. Instead, my mindfulness journey began through sitting with a sangha, or practice community,…
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Making space
For as long as I can remember, I have always been chasing space. Space to read, space to paint, space to watch a sunset, space to meditate, space to write, space to sew, space to sit in a sunbeam streaming through the window. You get the drift. It’s not that I have never had the…
My Silent Place 