Mindfulbalance

There were people who went to sleep last night,
poor and rich and white and black,
but they will never wake again.

And those dead folks would give anything at all
for just five minutes of this weather
or ten minutes of plowing.

So you watch yourself about complaining.

What you’re supposed to do
when you don’t like a thing is change it.
If you can’t change it,
change the way you think about it.

Maya Angelou

As Chögyam Trungpa said: “We forget that our ordinary, everyday life is the real teaching”

My God,

I pray better to You by breathing.

I pray better to You by walking, than by talking.

Thomas Merton

The Sabbath, a regular day of rest, had disappeared as a cultural institution from the secular world I lived in.

We let it slip from our fingers sometime in the past thirty years or so. Our hurry-up, twenty-four-hour-a-day lives will not allow Sabbaths, or spiritual resting places, and so time seems to fly ever faster, and we constantly feel we have less and less of it.

A permanent sense of lost or wasted time seems to haunt us, no matter how successful we are. “If only I had the time” becomes a constant refrain.

Gaby Eberle, Sacred Time and the Search for Meaning

When you encounter difficulties, the feelings and stories that arise in reaction are just that, feelings and stories. They are whirlwinds of confusion, based not in what is happening now but in deeply held beliefs about you and your relationship to the world.

Let them swirl – leaves in the wind.

Sometimes you fall back into them and lose touch with the present, but a moment of recognition always comes. Right then, come back to your body, come back to your breath, and rest.

The confusion, the stories and the feelings are still there. They continue to swirl, but you are not lost in them

Ken McLeod, Reflections on Silver River,