Thursday, October 18, 2012

"Start where you are"



This really moved me waking up to this morning; Elisabeth Gilbert had a conversation with Reverend Stephen Phelps and she posted this on Facebook:


 Human suffering is often caused by a feeling that we have "missed our path"—that we were meant to be somewhere else by now, but that some great injustice or cosmic mistake has placed us, instead, right here, exactly where we DON'T WANT TO BE. In such circumstances, we often become paralyzed by grief, or overcome by resentment, longing for that which has not come to pass in our lives. Reverend Phelps said that true peace begins when we accept that the path where we are now standing is the only road there is, and the only road there ever was. It doesn't mean you have to stay there forever, but it means "This is where you are right now". It is not an act of passivity to make that acceptance, but the opposite—an act of honesty, and a commitment to living within the real. Only when we have dropped the imaginary and accepted the real can we being our true journey—shaping and healing our lives in a positive way. I was very moved by this. It reminded me of the Buddhist instructor Pema Chodron's simple and beautiful teaching: 
  "Start Where You Are"~



with love Camilla

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