#ascetic

[ultraestonianblog]

#estonia #ascetic #2023 #winter wonderland #winter morning #winter #december #dacha #uruz #inguz #germany #forests #finland #trees and forests #algiz #alvhejm #darkness #darkmirwood #zabor

[disquietinglullabies]

The abandoned monastery of a vinegar making monk

#holy #abandoned #liminal #monastery #monk #religious #catholic #Christian #ascetic #asceticism #mine

[sspacegodd]

#mast #ascetic #india #sanyasin

[theinwardlight]

#quaker #quakerism #james nayler #self-abnegation #ascetic #faith #inner light #inner christ

[poligraf]

« On the Heights » (Tumo) by Nicholas Roerich

#tempera painting #tempera paintings #canvas #tempera on canvas #Nicholas Roerich #roerich #art #artwork #painting #paintings #landscapes #landscape #landscape art #mountainscapes #mountainscape #mountains #nature #human figure #colourful #colorful #blues #whites #pinks #purples #sitting meditation #meditation #ascetic monk #asceticism #ascetic #zazen

[principiumindividuationis777]

#fakir #India #Sufi #Islam #photography #historical #history #Victorian #black and white #ascetic #art #I own nothing

[howifeltabouthim]

. . . he poured the bath-salts in, and was surprised and a little ashamed how much he liked them.

L.P. Hartley, from The Harness Room

#toxic masculinity #ascetic #ashamed #self care #indulgence #bath #bath salts #quotes #lit #words #excerpts #quote #literature #l.p. hartley #the harness room

[pazzesco]

Etienne Beöthy - Action Directe - 1928

Etienne Beöthy - Ascetic - 1931

Etienne Beöthy - Danse Cosaque - 1930

#Etienne Beöthy #art #sculpture #Ascetic #Action Directe #Danse Cosaque #Cossack Dance

[kinfriday]

The Battle

There are times where I can sound like the love child of a drill sergeant and a physical trainer.

“The only easy day is yesterday!” I’ll say to myself, and others.

“It’s always too early to quit!” Another winner.

“Embrace the suck!” Are you groaning yet?

“Believe to achieve!”

I think I’ve made my point…

The problem is, as cliched and cringe as they may seem, I hold on to those like maxims. Chanting them in my mind like rosary prayers. I hold myself to high, some say impossible standards, and when I fail to meet those standards my world collapses into feelings of guilt, shame and hypocrisy.

I’d like to welcome you all to my November.

Right at the end of last month I began to have trouble with my right knee, and my morning routine began to be disrupted as I had to take days off to recover.

For most people this would be fine, but it’s always too early to quit.

grin

Pressing on, pushing myself harder than I should have I kept returning the moment it felt better which only saw me benched again one or two days later.

This was not good for me.

As that routine began to break down, other routines began to break down. Cascade failures in my habits began to occur especially with my nutrition and calorie tracking. Meanwhile I’m writing weekly blogs about the path I’m trying to forge with my ascetic aspirations.

Is this hypocrisy? Am I saying one thing and doing another as I grabbed the pretzel bag and spend hours curled up in my chair feeling miserable, eating my feelings?

It certainly feels that way. Yesterday, in my journaling, defines where I’ve been almost perfectly.

Morning: This is going to be your hardest day. Log every calorie… You can do this!

Evening: Failed again, failed utterly, but I did a little better than yesterday…At least I’ve got that going for me.

And the thing is, I’ve been trying not to fall into judgement here. I’ve been trying to look at my successes each day, of which there have been some. I’ve kept up with my writing, and my weekly fast. Meditation and journaling are going great for me as is this blog.

There’s a special joy in sharing this journey with each of you. Even entries like these that leave me feeling vulnerable and exposed have their shine. After all, if I’m going to walk this path, if I’m going to embody my principles, that means being open and honest about when I fail too.

Yet I haven’t been able to control my eating, or keep up with my running. My reading and studying has been weak as well so every success I have feels minimized.

With me it’s all or nothing… and the one thing I couldn’t understand is why this was happening. I have the conviction. I have the drive to make this work, but where’s my will?

I know what I’m capable of, I’ve seen what I’ve overcome, and for some reason I can’t put down the pretzels?

What the hell?

Then, as I’m going through all of this I have the audacity to say to anyone that I’m aspiring to an ascetic path as I embrace moments of utter decadence?

“Hypocrisy… I’m a hypocrite. That must be it. I’m half assing my path, and my life…”

Yet that’s not the truth. That’s guilt and judgement tying a blindfold around my eyes.

Last night, while talking with one of my partners, something clicked.

“Running is a way I deal with my stress. When I can’t run, I start looking for other avenues, and my oldest avenue is stress eating.”

In a moment, after a month of struggle, the veil fell and there was one of my oldest demons standing there grinning at me, and, in a flash, I understood why I was struggling so much with shame, and recrimination. Finally, I understood why this was devouring me.

Asceticism does not exist in a vacuum. It is not done for its sake alone. One might argue that asceticism without purpose is masochism. Rather, I’ve learned that by embracing hardships and rigor, I overcome some of my toughest demons. With structure I find focus that I turn towards the service of my Gods and those around me, and through that service and rigor, I find the reason and purpose of my life.

However, these elements are bricks in my foundations, and when some get removed things start falling apart. An undermined tower, no matter how strong, becomes vulnerable to a puff of wind.

Yet this is the journey. The true test of a path, and a discipline does not come when you’re at your best, but when you find yourself at your worst. It’s the resolve to try again after every failure, instead of giving up and almost every day this month, I have failed to live up to my own standards. As a result, I have woken up bitter and hateful of myself.

I have been completely miserable, but I’m not going to give up the fight.

Living your truth is not about success. Which seems strange, I know. It’s about living and embodying that truth in success and failure. It’s about the fight. I'm not always going to win, it’s not always going to go perfectly, and I will get cruelly crushed and tossed back to the starting line.

This is where the learning comes, and where the hard work begins. I know how I feel about myself. I feel the shame of every failure and know the pain of it, but what I do with it is up to me. I can beat myself down and make it worse, or I can hold on to my anchor points and struggle with it, battle with it.

One way leads to true defeat, the other leads to growth, preparing me for the next challenge.

It’s not about success, it’s not about failure, it’s about learning new lessons, with the new eyes I’ve gained from my struggle as I come to places both familiar and new on my journey.

As the saying goes, the struggle is the way.

-Sister Snow Hare

#heathen #heathenry #heathen asceticism #otherkin #therian #ascetic #asatru #troth #The way of the Hare #neopaganism #germanic paganism #stoicism #embrace the suck #embrace the cringe #discipline #do the hard thing #ask me anything #hypocrisy #failure #effort #self esteem #tw self worth #growth #resilience

[russianicons]

In our collection, we have icons dedicated to a variety of notable Orthodox Russian saints, and the name of Saint Macarius holds a special place among them. The ascetic and miracle worker established, at least, four monasteries in the Nizhniy Novgorod region, with the Zheltovodsky Makaryev Convent and the Makaryev Sviyazhsk Monastery being the most notable ones. The featured hand-painted icon dates back to the 19th century and features techniques common to the traditionalist movement in religious iconography.

#saintmacarius #saints #iconography #russianiconography #religiousicons #holyicons #holysaints #miracleworkers #ascetic #asceticism #religiousart #handpainting #orthodoxchristianity #orthodoxy

[ultraestonianblog]

Asceticism.

#2022 #me #www #Estonian #macro #ascetic #эваз

[brendanelliswilliams]

My Extemporaneous Homily for Trinity Sunday

[This extemporaneous homily given today on the Feast of the Holy Trinity at The Chapel of St. George is transcribed from an audio recording. I added a few clarifying words to the transcription, but I’ve otherwise preserved the spontaneity of the form in which it arose and was originally shared. Subsequent to the Mass this morning, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the work of the éskhaton (the ‘last things’, the ‘completion’) and its relationship to related notions in other traditions. I will likely do some reflective writing on that to share with all of you soon. But, in the meantime, here’s my little ‘Word of Life’ from this morning’s Mass. May it bless.]

The concept that is really in my heart and mind this year as I reflect on the Feast of the Holy Trinity is ‘participation’. And I’m thinking of this in terms of a particular technical theological framework, which has real application for us, I think. It’s known as ‘participatory eschatology’. ‘Participatory eschatology’ simply means that the way the final or last things, the completion of things, comes about is through our direct participation in the divine work. That’s all it means. Rather than us sitting around waiting for something to come from the sky and magically change everything, we participate in that transformative power of the divine will, as it goes out into the whole of Creation, and, according to an ancient mode of Christian theology I very much embrace, eventually brings all life back into union with itself. That notion is called apokatástasis: the ultimate ‘wholling’ or re-union of all Creation. 

We’re all invited to participate in that movement, in that divine unfoldment. And I think if the doctrine of the Trinity is worth anything, it’s that. It’s a reminder that we’re being invited to participate, not merely to have ideational constructs that sound fancy or that we’ve inherited and assumed as ‘beliefs’ without really understanding what they point to. If we get stuck there, we’re in trouble. And we’ve been stuck there a lot throughout the history of the Church, particularly in the West. We’ve been stuck a lot in ideas and beliefs. And that’s not a good place to be.

I’d like to read you something from the early Church. It’s a wondrous thing to look back at some of this theology—particularly the monastic witnesses from the early Church—and realize that a more expansive, breath-embracing understanding of Christian tradition was present in the beginning. It’s not a trend that we came up with because we wanted to conform the Church to our own modern ideas—it’s not that at all, actually. This expansive, mystical understanding of theology is really present in the early Church. This is from St. Macarius the Great. He says:

‘The soul that is found worthy to participate in the Holy Spirit and be illuminated by Her radiance, and by the ineffable glory of Her beauty, becomes Her throne and Her dwelling place. Such a soul becomes all light, all face, all eye. The soul becomes entirely covered with the spiritual eyes of light; nothing in it is left in shadow.’

Elsewhere St. Macarius also says that ‘God reveals God’s own nature to the soul and is discovered by the soul in direct knowledge (gnōsis), in wisdom, love, and faith….[with] the overseeing guidance of the spiritual intelligence’, so that the soul’s divine participation might blossom. ‘In short,’ he continues, ‘God made the soul like this so that it could be His own bride, that it might have communion with the Divine, to be merged in union with God, and so become as one spirit with God.’

That’s the journey, my friends—nothing less than that. To become merged in totalizing re-union with the Divine Ground: that’s our task. Not just to help a few things in the world here and there—that’s great too, but it’s really this divine re-union or ‘divinization’ (theosis) that we’re called to. In that, we participate directly in the life of the Trinity, in its spiritual economy: we are not looking at it as an object somehow removed from us, outside our direct experience, but we each become a Son or Daughter: we become another ‘Anointed One’, the Divine Child in Trinitarian reckoning, which lives and moves in unceasing communion with the Source, through the power and energy of the Holy Spirit. That’s what it means to be sanctified, to become a Saint.

And I want to say that we don’t have any more time to waste on anything short of this. I think you all have a sense—whether it’s consciously, not fully consciously yet, or whatever stage of processing you happen to be in—that the world is unraveling: the external world that we find ourselves in is unraveling. And we’re rushing head-long into these unprecedented modes and degrees of novelty, of bizarreness, of deconstruction and collapse: in our institutions, in the way we sustain ourselves on and with the Land, and all these other things. 

So, we don’t have time anymore to be stuck in beliefs and strange ideas we don’t fully grasp the application of. That was a luxury of the past. And now it’s incumbent upon us to do what St. Macarius is pointing to: to engage this process of real interior transformation, so that the whole Creation may be helped in its transformation, to come back into union with its Source. 

For these words, and all that has been offered here this morning, Amen.

Fr. B.+

#brendanelliswilliams #fatherbrendan #homily #sermon #mysticism #mysticaltheology #theology #spirituality #spiritualgrowth #trinity #transformation #ancient #wisdom #monastic #monasticism #ascetic #priest #teacher #spiritualteacher #spiritualdirection #contemplative #reflection #contemplation #depth #reclamation

[saltywatermelonart]

#saltywatermelonart #my post #not my pic #meme #vaporwave #ascetic #soda #early 90s #90s #windows #microsoft #japan #japanese #asia

[tarotindabox]

How to break the attachment to a person?

This was the question from my querent and by sharing this I'd like to show how Yogic path oracle works.

The Karma card indicates that this attachment is a part of karmic mission. In this deck, this card shows specifically the difficult aspect of karma, the one that is hard for us to overcome. Something that is not easy for us to control. Something that seems to be imposed from the outside. Literally means that we must surrender to our Higher Self and do what is required of us according to our dharma / mission. Practically the card answers that this attachment is difficult to break, since this is a karmic attachment.

Let's face it, it sounds discouraging that my client must surrender to what is happening ,whereas she feels uncomfortable, she does not want to be in a relationship with this man, and wants to get rid of thoughts and feelings about him completely, without accomplishing the karmic mission.

Since I know that karma can be burned off in various, mostly ascetic ways, I ask the question how can this karma be burned?

The Pratyahara card - "control of the senses" advises getting rid of some of the distractions in your life.Don't hold on to things, foods, or people. And the truth of the physical world is to let go of everything that isn't you. It has all become part of you, but in reality it is not you.It is time to let go of any attachments, even those that are less obvious.Meditate, as it will draw you into a state in which you will see what you are holding on to. This is the time to step back and immense into yourself.Pratyahara is translated as "removing oneself from that which nourishes feelings." Through the release of attachment through the senses, we get closer to self-realization and, ultimately, to inner peace.Let it all go so that you can become aware of your whole being.

In case of my client, we are really talking about the attachment to a person, so the cards came out as accurately as possible.

According to these cards, we can conclude that attachment can be defeated if there is a removal and deprivation from the object of your attachment. Let's take an example with coffee. If you want to stop drinking coffee, then stop buying it, stop seeing it, stop hearing about it, stop touching it, reading about it, having it in the house, smelling it, and so on. That is, all the senses must reject this object.

Yes, talking about it is easy, but in practice it takes a lot of strength and willpower. It operates with a sincere and strong desire to be free from the attachment. Breaking this karmic attachment turns out to be quite a real thing, although difficult. And the key to winning this battle is in connection with the sense organs, the strings are tied through them, on the nonmaterial level. Restrictions on the physical level will begin to work on the nonmaterial one as well. Everything is interconnected.

#tarot #tarotblr #spirituality #divination #witchblr #esoterics #oracle #yogic path oracle #tarot community #karma #karmic relationships #attachment #ascetic #ascetism #pratyahara

[sspacegodd]

#mast #saddhu #ascetic

[thesynaxarium]

Today we celebrate the Venerable Confessor Gabriel Urgebadze the Fool for Christ of Georgia. Saint Gabriel is one of the holiest people to have lived in the 20th century. Born and having lived his whole life in Georgia, Saint Gabriel was an extraordinary person even from his childhood. He often carried sticks and ran with them held up in the air, and birds would flock to sit on the child's sticks. He was first introduced to the faith at the age of 7 as he grew up in an atheistic communist society where orthodoxy was shunned. At the age of 12, he had a vision of an evil spirit which tried to scare him as the evil one was tired of his prayerful state. The young Saint was not phased by the vision, but only strengthened his faith in God. Growing up, he dedicated his whole life to Christ to the point where even his mother, who was a Christian, demanded him to "act like normal boys". He was often ridiculed for his faith and even suffered torture from the communist party, leaving him half dead. He spent much time at monasteries and eventually became a monk, but the trials did not end there. The communists could not stand his preaching and ordered that he be admitted to a mental asylum. This did not stop his fervour however. Once when conversing with a fellow Georgian who followed Hinduism, he performed a similar miracle as did Saint Spyridon at the first Ecumenical Council - he held bread which at the name of the Holy Trinity, turned into fire, wheat, and water. Towards the end of his life, he lived at a hermit and was often seen conversing with people that were not seen by others. On November 2nd 1995, the Holy Elder gave up his soul to the Lord, having served Him from the age of 12. May the venerable confessor intercede for us always + #saint #gabriel #confessor #foolforchrist #georgia #ascetic #prayer #love #child #young #communist #trinity #holy #holytrinity #spyridon #stspyridon #stgabriel #saintgabriel #orthodox (at Mtskheta • მცხეთა) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ckbpeq8Law4/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#saint #gabriel #confessor #foolforchrist #georgia #ascetic #prayer #love #child #young #communist #trinity #holy #holytrinity #spyridon #stspyridon #stgabriel #saintgabriel #orthodox