An untrained mind turns difficulty into suffering twice: once in life, and again endlessly in imagination.
When your thoughts are racing and repetitive, remember: no one can harm you as much as your untamed mind.
When you are struggling or in pain remember: no one can help you as much as a quiet, clear, composed mind.
Jack Kornfield
If you feel like you’re running out of time, read this: You’re not. This is just the story we’ve been sold, and it has become the shadow that lingers over everything we do.
Your life shouldn’t feel like a race, because it isn’t one. Where there are fast days, there should be slow days that follow, days where you can reflect and recalibrate because everything you are going through right now is preparing you for the next chapter, every challenge directly informing the decisions that you’re about to make for yourself.
Being present will show you what is worth taking with you along the way as you navigate life because the destination won’t bring you peace unless you let the journey teach you who you are, and just how much capacity you have to experience change, both within yourself and in the world.
You aren’t running out of time, so don’t be afraid to slow down. Things fall into place when we create space for them to.
Şeyda Noir, Australian–Cypriot writer and poet.
Traditionally it is said that each twenty-four hours contains 50,000,000 separate instants, like so many frames in a movie.
We think we see continuity, but it is all an illusion.
Taizen Maezumi, On Zen Practice
A reminder: meditation is not an activity. Its not something you do, its not another thing on the list.
Its a stopping of activity, it’s a returning to this home base, to our very own existence, that we totally ignore almost all our lives unless we remember not to.
We shouldn’t really call it meditation, perhaps non-meditation would be better.
It’s a return to what’s already here before we’ve done anything.
Henri Shukman
I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour.
If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
What is unique about a moment that has the power to bless us and the potential to feed us is not so much in the power of the moment itself, but rather the quality of the presence we bring to that moment.
Our presence can change an ordinary, unnoticed moment into a moment of beauty that can feed the soul.
Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary.
Macrina Wiederkehr, osb, 1939 – 2020
