On a cold January day with snow still on the ground, I reached out for some warming John O’Donohue wisdom. I wasn’t disappointed! Let us all come home to our warm inner hearths.
“In everyone’s inner solitude there is that bright and warm hearth. The idea of the unconscious, even though it is a very profound and wonderful idea, has sometimes frightened people away from coming back to their own hearth.
We falsely understand the subconscious as the cellar where all of our repression and self-damage is housed. Out of our fear of ourselves we have imagined monsters down there.
Yeats says, “Man needs reckless courage to descend into the abyss of himself.” In actual fact, these demons do not account for all the subconscious. The primal energy of our soul holds a wonderful warmth and welcome for us.
One of the reasons we were sent onto the earth was to make this connection with ourselves, this inner friendship.”*~ John O’Donohue
Its so reassuring to hear these words from John O’Donohue. No matter how we judge ourselves, there is a deep loving center within us all. It takes courage to go there and makes friends with what is in the dark.
I love the idea that there is a warm inner hearth ready to welcome us home.
Namaste
* O’Donohue, John. Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (pp. 99-100). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
