Stress is an alarm clock that lets you know
you’ve attached to something not true for you.
Byron Katie
Stuck
ordinary things
Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things.
A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages.
And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
locked inside our brains
All Eastern traditions agree that constant striving for a future state is the root of our unhappiness. No surprise then that the West, with its focus on achievement, has such high levels of anxiety and depression.
.Our society is very result-oriented, that’s why we are so competitive. That’s why we are always stressed, because we are always looking at something in the distance.
If you are always looking at the top of the mountain you are climbing, you cannot be aware of the grass and flowers growing at your feet.
We are always looking ahead, aren’t we? And then the actual thing, the actual living, passes us by. We are locked inside our brains, cut off from the present moment, always centered on something beyond our reach.
Tenzin Palmo, Reflections on a Mountain Lake
The change of outside circumstances
Pleasure depends very much on circumstances, what triggers it. Then it’s a sensation, in a way. So sensations change from pleasurable to neutral and to unpleasurable. I mean even the most pleasurable thing – you eat something very delicious. Once, it’s delicious. Two, three times, OK. And then ten times, you get nauseous…. The most beautiful music, you hear it five times, 24 hours, it’s a nightmare. And also, it’s something that basically doesn’t radiate to others. You can experience pleasure at the cost of others’ suffering. So it’s very vulnerable to the change of outer circumstances. It doesn’t help you to face the outer circumstances better.
Now if we think of happiness as a way of being, a way of being that gives you the resources to deal with the ups and downs of life, that pervades all the emotional states, including sadness.
So we have to distinguish mental factors which contribute to that way of being, the cluster of qualities like altruistic love, inner freedom, and so forth, from those who undermine that, which is like jealousy, obsessive desire, hatred, arrogance. We call that “mental toxins,” because they poison our happiness and also make us relate to others in a poisonous way. So happiness is something that you can cultivate, unlike pleasure. You don’t cultivate pleasure, but happiness in that sense is a skill.
Matthieu RIcard, On Being interview
Sunday Quote: Whole
There’s a place in your soul
where you’ve never been wounded.
Meister Eckhart
enduring strength
Springtime. We trust the grass to rise again; Trust your own returning.
Let us not forget to be quietly powerful,
growing like a blade of grass.
Omid Safi
Mindfulbalance 