Bless with Attention

"Whatever is newly born needs a name and when we are more and more  welcomed by the silence, naming becomes our job. We have to notice, to bless with attention the beasts before us, both the rough and the smooth.

To name is to bring an attitude of wonder to the work of sorting, and even to the work of dealing with difficult states of mind. When we can name what is happening to us, we are no longer fully identified with it and have begun to separate from the grasping dark.

If what we feel is known and named to be a tiger, then the whole world is not tiger. We can divide the compulsion and the image, the action and the emotion. There is a landscape through which we move, trees casting their own stripes on the forest floor, places where tiger is not."

~ John Tarrant, from The Light inside the Dark

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See also: "The Importance of Naming Your Emotions," by Tony Schwartz, The New York Times, April 3, 2015