Some seeds for your meditations
Krishnamurti, Carl Jung, Tao Te Ching, Ger Murphy
Mary Oliver, David Whyte Crowfoot W.H.Auden
Pesha Gertler, Jesus
Click here for whole text of patanjali's yoga sutras
From Krishnamurti
"Do you think a leaf that falls to the ground is afraid of death?
Do you think a bird lives in fear of dying?
It meets death when death comes, but is not concerned about death; it is much too occupied with living,
with catching insects, building a nest, singing a song, flying for the very joy of flying.
Have you ever watched birds soaring high up in the air without a beat of their wings,
being carried along by the wind?
How endlessly they seem to enjoy themselves!
They are not concerned about death. If death comes, it is all right, they are finished.
There is no concern about what is going to happen;
they are living from moment to moment, are they not?
It is we human beings who are always concerned about death - because we are not living.
That is the trouble: we are dying, we are not living."
J Krishnamurti 'Think on These Things'
From Tao Te Ching
Thirty three
Knowing others is wisdom;
Knowing the self is enlightenment.
Mastering others requires force
Mastering the self needs strength.
He who knows he has enough is rich.
Perseverance is a sign of will power.
He who stays where he is endures.
To die but not to perish is to be eternally present.
Tao Te Ching (Nine) Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English Wildwood, London 1976
Eighty
A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times faster than man, they are not needed.
The people take death seriously and do not travel far.
Though they have boats and carriages, no one uses them.
Though they have armor and weapons, no one displays them.
Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing.
Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple, their homes secure;
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbors,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way,
Yet they leave each other in peace while they grow old and die.
Tao Te Ching (Nine) Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English Wildwood, London 1976
Here is a poem from Ger Murphy who completed Contemporary Yoga
Teacher Training
This is my place.
A shape of rubber matting has become a home,
A magic carpet
An open grave,
A place to meet my lover,
A shrine,
A site to sit alone.
From the sacred to the sweaty,
From the dancer to the drone,
When I step on board ,bow to my lord, the next step has begun.
I am blessed with twist and stretch,
Fed with breath and bend,
The flow of water, tongue of fire , wake my sleeping land,
`till I feel a hand take me, make_ me ,break me ,
_this is the plan ,I am in my clan,
_and I am not alone.
Ger Murphy June 2005.
From Carl Jung
True love will always commit itself and engage in lasting ties; it needs freedom only to effect its choice, not for its accomplishment. Every true and deep love is a sacrifice. The lover sacrifices all other possibilities, or rather, the illusion that such possibilities exist. If this sacrifice is not made, his illusions prevent the growth of any deep and responsible feeling, so that the possibility of experiencing real love is denied him.
Carl Gustav Jung from ‘Aspects of the Masculine’ Routledge p 65
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
from 'Wild Geese' Mary Oliver
Lost by David Whyte
Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
Extract from The Heart Aroused by David Whyte
NATIVE AMERICAN
What is life? It is the flash of the firefly in the night.
It is the breath of the buffalo in the winter time.
It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
(Last words of Crowfoot of the Blackfoot tribe. Touch the earth. T.C. Mc Luithan. Abacus. London 1986)
CHRISTIAN
Jesus said
The mote that is in thy brothers eye thou seest
But the beam that is in thine eye
Thou seest not
When thou castest out the beam in thine own eye
Then thou wilt see clearly to cast the mote
Out of thy brothers eye.
(Bible LUKE v.6 4.1)
The Healing Time
finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin,my bones
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
when I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy