Events themselves are neutral; distress arises from our judgment about them,
You dont have to turn this into something
It doesn’t have to upset you
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book VI, section 52
stuff happens
go through the body
It’s about being embodied, being with the primary experience of being alive, rather than with the nervous energy of our daily and kammic functions.
When there is embodied security and confidence, the breathing-energy will carry that message through the entire body. It’s about simplifying and getting to the roots of what you’re experiencing. Notice how triggering and conditioning occur.
Learn to calm these saṅkhārā by referring to them directly: not so much ‘They don’t like me’ but ‘agitation and uncertainty’. Translate ‘I should be’ and ‘I ought to do’ into ‘pressure’. Then you can contain these activating effects in your entire body (widen attention to include feet and back) and through mindfully relaxing, release them
Remember: there’s nothing wrong with you.
Ajahn Sucitto
Stop seeking
All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is
to stop seeking something more or better or different,
and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.
Adyashanti
Our attitudes
A fish doesn’t know what water is because it sees and experiences everything through the medium of water. Like a fish in water, we swim in the medium of our attitudes: WE are this or that sort of person. We are kind, generous, animated, quiet, fearful, grouchy, stingy, nice, not very nice, relaxed, anxious. We think life is good, people are good. Or we think life is a struggle and people are not to be trusted. And so on. ….. It’s hard to see ourselves accurately. Our attitudes distort the picture.
Generosity confronts and softens our basic attitudes. To practice it is to appreciate the natural abundance of being, the inherent generosity of time and space, and the ongoing unfolding of life. These are exquisite gifts. Life itself is generous. Life is always making more life. Life is abundant and expansive, never stingy or small-minded.
The practice of generosity eventually effects a basic attitude shift toward the recognition that we are living creatures who share in life’s great abundance, freedom, and energy. So we always have possibilities. We always find a way, no matter how or what, to further our life.
We just have to figure out how to stop getting in our own way.
Norman Fischer
How to listen
He learned more from the river than Vasudeva could teach him. He learned from it continually.
Above all, he learned from it how to listen with a still heart, with a waiting open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinions
Hesse, Siddartha
Do Not Miss the Day
‘What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?’
Philip Larkin, Days
