Lectio Divina - One hundred and three

Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), 55.

If we are to live our lives fully and well, we must learn to embrace the opposites, to live in a creative tension between our limits and our potentials. We must honor our limitations in ways that do not distort our nature, and we must trust and use our gifts in ways that fulfill the potentials God gave us. We must take the no of the way that closes and find the guidance it has to offer -- and take the yes of the way that opens and respond with the yes of our lives.

Lectio Divina - One hundred and two

Philip Novak, “Developing Your Awareness,” in Inner Knowing, ed. Helen Palmer. New York: Tarcher, 1998.

The mere act of trying to hold the mind to a single point, an act with which higher forms of meditation begin, teaches the beginner in a radically concrete and experiential way that he or she has little or no control over the mental flow. All attentional training starts with this failure. This is the first great step in the work of objectifying the mental flow, that is, of seeing it not as something that “I” am doing but something that is simply happening.