Parinama

    We all want to know how to be more happy right?! A recent NYT article on the subject noted that people were happiest when having sex or out in nature and perhaps doubly so while having sex in nature!   Working and caring for children were low on the list of happiness indicators. Money once we have enough for our basic needs, like a decent and safe place to live and send our children to school, nutritious food, health insurance, doesn’t lead to much more happiness.     From the spiritual view, measuring happiness misses the point of what we more deeply long for which is not really happiness but contentment which gives us a fuller and richer experience of well-being. Assessing an experience for its happiness quotient based on how it makes us feel in the moment misses how our experiences of the events of our lives change and ripen overtime.   What may have been challenging and even despairing in the moment can turn out to be an experien...

  We all experience times of darkness when nothing seems to sooth the emptiness and longing inside. St. John of the Cross the 16 th century Spanish mystic named these times when we are inconsolable as the Dark Night of the Soul.   While the Dark Night is a painful and dark passage, it is different than depression.   While in depression there is an inability to feel, in the Dark Night there is an overabundance of feeling.   We become exquisitely tender and open to feeling without resistance or veils.   Unarmored, we experience the preciousness and fragility of life but also stand in awe of existence itself in all its complexity and mystery.   While the tenderness can feel painful like bruise and we may feel very alone and vulnerable, there is a strong urge to go deeper into the woundedness and darkness rather than clinging to something that might at least superficially pacify the hurt. “Touching the hurting place with love,” James Finley ...

  Through contemplative practices, we have been intimately awakened to the cannot-get-to-the-bottom-of-it nature of the life we are living.   James Finley, The Contemplative Heart    I was literally shaken and disturbed-knowing clearly that I was all wrong, that I was going against everything that made sense in my life, going against all that was true and authentic in my vocation, going against the grace and love of God. Struggling desperately in my heart and knowing I was helpless, that things were moving in a certain direction and I had gone too far to turn back." Thomas Merton, Learning to Love,  Volume six 1966-1967       I have been reading Thomas Merton’s journals.   Merton, a beloved Trappist monk known to many as a modern day mystic, philosopher, poet, and Catholic priest, kept account of his days in seven volumes of journals which were published 25 years after his death.   I have read the last two, the o...