June 24      

Today's quotation:

Be sure that it is not you that is mortal, but only your body.  For that person whom your outward form reveals is not yourself; the spirit is the true self, not that physical figure which can be pointed out by your finger.

Cicero

Today's Meditation:

It's so easy to identify with these bodies.  After all, we feel through them-- much of our pleasure and pain comes to us through our bodies.  We have five senses that help us to make sense of the world, and those senses are integral parts of these bodies.  So it makes sense that we come to identify ourselves with our bodies, and we start to feel that the inevitable mortality that has to be a part of the body also is a part of us.  This isn't true, though.

"We" are not our bodies.  While it is very important to take care of these bodies if we want them to be good to us while we're on this planet, we shouldn't get too strongly identified with them.  After all, as Cicero says, "the spirit is the true self."  The part of me that feels love and compassion is who I really am, and that's not my body.  Sometimes we get very strongly identified with our brains because that's where the thinking seems to come from, but our lives aren't just about thinking.

So while we develop exercises to take care of our bodies and we search out intellectual stimuli for our brains, what do we do to develop our spirits?  How do we help them to grow and develop?  Or do we take them for granted and just ignore them?  Or, even worse, do we completely forget that we do have spirits, the integral parts of ourselves that will continue on once this life here is finished?

Remembering that we are spiritual beings is an important first step to take if we're to develop ourselves into more than what we currently are.  We should never neglect our physical selves, of course, for that would be a terrible squandering of wonderful gifts.  But as it stands, most people squander the gift of their spirituality because they simply get caught up in the physical world and lose sight of the rest of the world.

Questions to consider:

How often do you consider the spiritual side of yourself?

What happens to our spirits when we neglect them?

Why is it easy to forget that we're spiritual beings having a physical experience, rather than physical beings searching out spiritual experiences?

For further thought:

Our rushing and our busyness create a fog layer that encloses us, surrounding us with thicker and thicker layers externally and building denser and denser fog layers within.  Pretty soon, we have lost touch with that which guides our lives.  We need contact with our spirituality to be the people we would like to be.


Anne Wilson Schaef

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