Your True Source

When you take the time to draw on your listening-imagination, you will begin to hear this gentle voice at the heart of your life. It is deeper and surer than all the other voices of disappointment, unease, self-criticism and bleakness. All holiness is about learning to hear the voice of your own soul. It is always there and the more deeply you learn to listen, the greater surprises and discoveries that will unfold.

To enter into the gentleness of your own soul changes the tone and quality of your life. Your life is no longer consumed by hunger for the next event, experience or achievement. You learn to come down from the treadmill and walk on the earth. You gain a new respect for yourself and others and you learn to see how wonderfully precious this one life is. You begin to see through the enchanting veils of illusion that you had taken for reality. You no longer squander yourself on things and situations that deplete your essence. You know now that your true source is not outside you. Your soul is your true source and a new energy and passion awakens in you.

– John O’Donohue
Excerpted from Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
HarperCollins
2005

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Source Is Within You
• A Season of Listening – Part I | II | III | IV | V | VI
• Cultivating Stillness
• A Sacred Pause
• Aligning With the Living Light
• Mystical Participation
• I Need Do Nothing . . . I Am Open to the Living Light
• Finding Balance in the Presence of the Beloved
• Intimate Soliloquies
• Resting in the Presence of the Beloved
• Today I Will Be Still
• Time to Go Inwards
• In the Stillness and Silence of This Present Moment
• The Soul’s Beloved
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything is Possible
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• Dwelling in Peace

Image: A filter-treated image of Syrian-born dancer Ahmad Joudeh, whose autobiography, Dance or Die, I’m currently reading. Ahmad dedicates his memoir “to the spirit that guides every single one of us, in the memory of the soul, where the flame is, our spirits glow.”