Quotes from Karen Speerstra

Focusing techniques that enhance attentiveness (such as mindfulness meditation) help to increase appreciation for the simple blessings of life and banish incompatible thoughts from consciousness. For that reason, celebrating the ordinary is a practice that requires paying attention. Embrace the temporary. Live in the moment. Be grateful for all the little things. Let your eyes linger on what's right in front of you.

To serve, Martin Luther King Jr. said, all you need is a soul generated by love. We are "God-in-action" through our smiles, our willing hands, our busy feet, our gentle voices, and all the other ways we find to show our love.

Tibetan Buddhism teaches that suffering is a feeling that our wishes are not being fulfilled. Or that no one is listening to us or does what we expect them to do.

Mortality teaches clinicians that there is more to doctoring than diagnosing and treating injuries and diseases, more even than saving lives. Mastery of physiological, pathological, and pharmacological knowledge and expertise is essential, but insufficient. Science only becomes medicine when it is applied with caring intention to promote the well-being of people — mortal people.

The Dalai Lama said, "If you are mindful of death, it will not come as a surprise — you will not be anxious. You will feel that death is merely like changing your clothes." Finally we can let go of all responsibility for making things happen and acknowledge that we lived life as a gift. It has meaning.

Death isn't the problem. Fear is. And fear is something we create." Julia Assante, The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear

How then shall we live? Fully. Intentionally. Attentively. Lovingly.

The clergyman and writer William Sloane Coffin said that spirituality to him meant "living the ordinary life extraordinarily well." We wake up to an ordinary day. The sky is blue. Trees sway in the breeze and birds twitter. Everything is as usual. Our hearts beat; our lungs take in air. We talk to friends. We eat dinner. We brush our teeth. And finally, when we put our heads down on our favorite pillows, we think, "This was a good, very ordinary day.

We mourn with those who mourn; weep with those in tears. John Ruusbroec, the fourteenth-century Dutch mystic, said "compassion is a wounding of the heart which love extends to all without distinction." At the end of life, as at the beginning of life, we need communities of compassion to hold our pain.

however, we start with the presumption that all life is a gift, then gratitude is not an occasional moment when we remember to say thank you to a spouse or to a service provider. Instead, it creates a way of living that acknowledges human neediness and dependency as unavoidable. Gratitude, then, becomes as normal as breathing.

In a talk he gave two hours before his death in 1968, the renowned Trappist monk Thomas Merton said, "The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another and all involved with one another.

When we embrace all our feelings, all our emotions including suffering, hope will endure and sustain us. We can then truly live and face our last moments with integrity and wholeness.