my favorite zen notes

~ February 2009 forward

a spiritual offering, zen/notes provides thoughtful seekers time to pause and reflect. zen notes on this page come exclusively from zennotes publisher
jim lorentzen, Portland, Oregon 503-254-5282

A healer is someone who helps and supports people in the process of learning to trust their own inner truths, and to live more fully and freely.

~ Shatki Gawain

The only thing we never get enough of is love;
and the only thing we never give enough of is love. ~Henry Miller

Do not look for rest in in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for Joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and Joy you have not yet begun to live.~Thomas Merton

Expect to have hope rekindled.

Expect your prayers to be answered in wondrous ways.

The dry seasons in life do not last. The spring rains will come again.

~Sarah Ban Breathnach

Music...gives wings to the mind,

a soul to the universe,flight to the imagination,

a charm to sadness,a life to everything.
~Plato

Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keep friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.
~ Greenville Kleisser

Connecting With Our Inner Life

Maybe one of the ways to reconnect with your deeper soul-life is to recover a sense of the soul's shyness. Though it may be personally difficult to be shy, it is an attractive quality in a person. In an unexpected piece of advice, Nietzsche says one of the best ways to make someone interested in you is to blush.

The value of shyness, it's mystery and reserve, is alien to the brash immediacy of many modern encounters. If we are to connect with our inner life, we need to learn not to grasp at the soul in a direct or confrontational way. In other words, the neon consciousness of much modern psychology and spirituality will always leave us in soul poverty.

~John O'Donohue, Anam Cara, A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Prepare the Day
Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill... I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together...

~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book II, part 1

I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.

~ Joseph Priestley

Recipients of our appreciation are apt to express their own gratitude to others, lengthening the unending, golden chain of connections-in-goodness that stretches across the world.~Mary Ford Grabowsky,The Way of Mary

To get joy, we must give it and to keep joy we must scatter it. ~John Templeton

An act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that succeeds, for love is measured by its own fullness, not by its reception.
~Harold Loukes, [Quaker]

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