When we are at home in the garden, tending and nurturing all its plants, animals, and minerals, living with them through all the seasons and days, then healing comes upon us like a gift and makes us whole.
Healing is a journey deep within oneself -- a search for soul, the essence of the self. It seeks to balance the inner and outer worlds to connect and to integrate. Healing is the reuniting of the body, mind and spirit.
Healing is embracing what is most feared; healing is opening what has been closed, softening what has hardened into obstruction, healing is learning to trust life.
When you awaken your heart, you find to your surprise that your heart is empty. If you search for the awakened heart, there is nothing but tenderness. You feel sore and soft, and if you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness. It occurs because your heart is completely open, exposed. It is the pure raw heart that has the power to heal the world.
~ by C. Trungpa in A PATH WITH HEART by Jack Kornfeld
I was never in a hurry in my life. He lives long who enjoys life and bears no jealousy of others, whose heart harbors no malice or anger, who sings a lot and cries a little, who rises and retires with the sun, who likes to work, and who knows how to rest.
Healing does not necessarily mean to become physically well or to be able to get up and walk around again. Rather, it means achieving a balance between the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions. . . . At the end of their lives [five-year-old children with leukemia] they have little or no pain. They are emotionally sound, and on an intellectual level they can share things it is almost impossible to believe could come from a child. To me this is a healing, although they are not well from our earthly point of view.
~ from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in HEALERS ON HEALING by Richard Carlson
Healing is bringing oneself into harmony with the universe and the Divine creative force. It makes us whole and happy, content . . . and happiness is heaven.
Healing is more than eliminating disease symptoms; it is a process of achieving wholeness, alignment, and integration that encompasses every level of our being. Healing encourages self-awareness and enables us to express our unique potential more fully in our work, study, and relationships with ourselves and others. The healing journey not only helps us connect to our own inner rhythms, but also brings us closer to our spiritual nature and the world around us.
We warmly welcome you, dear friends, to Still Point Mountain Retreat, the new home of Friends of Silence. We hope you will come and discover the “still point” of your “turning world,” where in the words of T.S. Eliot there is “neither movement from nor towards, neither ascent nor decline,” and where “except for the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
Nestled next to the 1400-acre nature preserve of Rolling Ridge, near Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, Still Point offers a secluded setting for personal retreat, families, small groups, and occasional special-topic retreats. Still Point’s 3-bedroom, 2- bath log cabin, 1-room guest cottage, 2 teepees, and camping space offer sacred space to reflect, pray, relax, and enjoy the beauty of wilderness.
Check the new Friends of Silence website for information on facilitated group retreats, private retreat space, spiritual direction and other resources.
The divine presence that we sense in sacred places is often reinforced by architecture and decoration that reflect our aspirations toward the heavens. A sacred place requires a clear spiritual focus and separation from its physical surroundings. The word "temple" (and the associated activity of contemplation) -- Latin templum --means a piece of land marked off from ordinary uses and dedicated to the divine. Sacred structures provide expressions of, rather than merely a shell for, numinous experience
~ from THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL by Jane Hope
The sacred cannot be precisely defined. Each of us perceives it through the lens of a unique personal history. For me, sacredness is an experience of the inner radiance of life, the unseen force that transforms and nourishes the physical world but is never limited by it. There is something more to it, a mystery that is never totally grasped.
I have learned to treat my garden as the sacred place it is and it continually nourishes me both in body and in spirit Earth is sacred too, and whatever we do to her will come back to us many times over. If we treat her as merely a resource and a place to throw our refuse, we will reap only death and disease. If we treat her as the sacred place she is, we will reap the benefits of living on sacred ground.;
Be aware of the sacred site . . . Sacred sites are sacred because our response to them is sacred. There is a resonance between the sacred within and the sacred without . . .
The sacred is within our hearts . . .
Visit sacred sites, yes. Bathe in the resonance, inspire the divine. But never forget where lies the holiest power of all.
We become aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane . . . something sacred shows itself to us . . . something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural "profane" world.
When humans participate in ceremony, they enter a sacred space. Everything outside of that space shrivels in importance. Time takes on a different dimension. Emotions flow more freely. The bodies of participants become filled with the energy of life, and this energy reaches out and blesses the creation around them.
Frederick Franck turned to the door of the building, a massive wooden sculpture in the form of the sun and its rays, and pushed it open. I saw that it turned on a central axis, so that only one half of the door was open at any one time. To remind us, he murmured, that we step into this sacred space as we walk into life, alone and silently . . . I looked around me and marveled at this ninety-year-old man from whose hand had sprung everything I could see. He had carved the door, made the stained-glass windows and every other object in sight. Pacem in Terris, I realized, was one man’s act of artistic faith: a work of art outside the parameters of the art world, and also a religious statement unconfined by any religion.
Nature is a sacred space that has the power to draw us out of our small mind into the one Big Mind of God. During warm weather, praying and meditating outside in nature can naturally enhance your practice. You can pray anywhere, even on the subway, but whenever you find yourself in a place that feels sacred, you have already made the connection with God.
Warm, Springtime Greetings, dear friends! The changing of seasons always brings to mind that well known passage in Ecclesiastes, "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven." Consider the vast meaning within so few words! How does nature know? How do those perennials we plant know when to begin to grow again, the trees to begin budding and leafing? How do the birds know when to migrate back to their summer homes, to begin mating and nesting? The will to grow and expand is directed by a life force beyond our human comprehension. We can only observe in awe and gratitude the world our Creator has given us. As we fall silent before such miracles, let us ask for help in caring for the earth and its treasures that they may continue to sustain us and all future generations in abundance and in beauty.
The mountains, rivers, earth grasses, trees, and forests are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed, ultimate truth.
To see all things at their origin, their beginning, puts us in kinship with all that lives: trees, birds, stars seem foreign to us only inasmuch as we perceive them outside of our common origin with them. To drink at the source of all that lives and breathes expands the heart and makes the blood sing, echoing the song of all the vital fluids in the world. To dwell near all beginnings is to draw infinitely near to that which creates both the unity and the diversity of all beings.
~ from THE SACRED EMBRACE OF JESUS AND MARY by Jean-Yves Leloup
This earth is my sister: I love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am, how we admire this strength in each other, all that we have lost, all that we have suffered, all that we know: we are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget: what she is to me, what I am to her.
"It doesn’t matter to most people that the wind sings in the trees or that a mountain shimmers in the sunlight. But you find life in all this, a life you can partake of."
I replied that no one understands nature: a tree bathed in sunlight, a weathered stone, an animal, a mountain, each has life, has a tale to tell, is a life, suffers, endures, experiences joy, dies -- but we don’t understand it.
Be a gardener. Dig a ditch, toil and sweat and turn the earth upside down and seek the deepness and water the plants in time. Continue this labor and make sweet floods to run and noble and abundant fruits to spring. Take this food and drink and carry it to God as your true worship.
