MSI Press Blog

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie. -29-   Life is a choice. Psychological pain is not a choice. Either way you go, you will have problems and pain. So, the choice here is not about whether to have pain. The choice is whether or not to live a meaningful life.   Steven C. Hayes   We all suffer. The life free of distress and suffering is illusory, or, at least, the quest to avoid psychological pain leaves you spiritually hollow. Want to avoid anxiety? Don’t try anything new. Want to avoid sadness? Don’t do anything where you could fail. Want to avoid grief? Don’t have relationships. You may see people out there who seem to have lives of unbridled happiness and joy, but as you look closely, you’ll find that their experience is more about transformation of suffering than the absence of suffering. No less a joyful spirit than His Holiness the Dalai Lama speaks of time...

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie. -4-   Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.   Helen Keller   The story of the man being kind to his challenged wife introduces a vital element in the idea of miracles. Thinking of miracles as “objects of wonder,” calling forth “awe and admiration,” making you smile… does not presume a rosy and gleeful understanding of life. To the contrary. Life entails suffering, and it is perhaps in the setting of suffering that the ability to pause and behold at least the shadow of the miracle can be most life-giving. As we move toward the end of the second decade of this century, the cohort of women and men who survived the Holocaust is dwindling, but their powerful stories remain. Edith Herz was born in 1926 to a comfortable Jewish family in Germany. They lived in Worms, which had...