Being, not doing

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My teacher told me to hold on to the sense ‘I am’ tenaciously and not to swerve from it even for a moment. I did my best to follow his advice and in a comparatively short time I realized within myself the truth of his teaching. This brought an end to the mind; in the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am – unbound.

I simply followed (my teacher’s) instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being, ‘I am’, and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with nothing but the ‘I am’ in my mind, and soon peace and joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it, all disappeared – myself, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained, and unfathomable silence.

 Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, 1897 –1981 indian non dualist teacher

renewable

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You are impermanent and renewable, like your breath, like your steps. You are not something permanent experiencing something impermanent. You are something impermanent experiencing something impermanent.

If happiness can be renewed, so can you, because you in the next moment is a renewal of you in this moment. It’s wonderful to know that happiness lasts only as long as one in-breath or one step, because we know we can renew our happiness in another breath or another step.

Thich Nhat Hahn, The Art of Power

Sunday Quote: Oneness

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Close your eyes. Find green mountains and pure water within your heart. Silently drinking, feel these become part of you.

When you hold the green tea in the bowl in your hands

The self and the natural world cease to be separate.

Sen Genshitsu, 1923 – 2025, \Grand master of the Urasenke tea tradition

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the hearts of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe.

Black Elk Speaks , recorded early 20th Century

As the leaves return

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The Spring Equinox: transformation is often quiet, patient, and without spectacle

Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them.

But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.

Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Hermann Hesse, Trees, Reflections and Poems


friendship with life

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I keep yearning for this friendship with life, which is the deeper home I am returned to when I put down all I carry…

Our friendship with life is the ever‑present sanctuary of being that waits beneath our struggles.

Mark Nepo, The Fifth Season: Creativity in the Second Half of Life

…and holding things together

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The irony is that we attempt to disown our difficult stories to appear more whole or more acceptable, but our wholeness actually depends on the integration of all our experiences, including the falls.

The self is not really a thing, but a process – one that is always changing, always falling apart, and always being reassembled in new ways.

We think that if we can hold ourselves together, we will be safe. But the truth is that the only way we can be truly safe is to acknowledge how fragile we are.

It is only when we stop pretending that we can hold it all together that we discover the indestructibility of our true nature.

Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart