Month: March 2011

Reducing stress: Just be aimless for a while

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This is good advice when the weather is as beautiful as it is today. Sometimes stress comes at us in the form of busyness or deadlines at work, which do not give up. Therefore it is good for us to take time out from them – even ten minutes – and to simply have time for ourselves without the pressure  to respond to others or to timetables. All the better if this can be done outdoors, in a park or by the Lake:

Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.  We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops.

Maya Angelou

Being open to whatever happens today

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It’s the rose’s unfolding …… that creates the desire to see –
In every colour and circumstance, may the eyes be open for what comes.

Ghalib, For the raindrop

We grow our own future

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The heart is like a garden.

It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love.

What seeds will you plant there?

Buddha

….and endures all kinds of change

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If we think of happiness as a way of being, as something that represents a state of flourishing, of fulfillment, of a well-being that endures through all events in life, even all different kinds of emotions and mental states, something that gives you the inner resources to deal with whatever comes your way—pleasant, unpleasant circumstances, helpful circumstances, adverse circumstances—something that gives you some kind of platform or way of being that’s behind all that, and that gives you the resources to deal with all that.

Matthieu Ricard

Happiness is already here…..

Karl Duffy1 Comment

An interesting quote. Sometimes we look in all kinds of places for our happiness – a new relationship, a better car, a holiday, other people, a more prestigious job. However most research and practice shows that very little of happiness is due to changes in external circumstances, or getting the world to be as we think it should be. These things change all the time,  and even when we think we have gotten the mix right, and feel we are in control,  it is often a short-lived illusion. Rather, happiness  is a skill,  or a group of skills, that we can cultivate, based on a source of natural goodness already within us, with which we approach both good and bad in life as they arise and pass away before us. Looking for happiness creates a duality which is not always helpful. Always focusing outside of ourselves means that we do not often realize what we already have, and fail to live in this moment, as we work to change ourselves and our circumstances to “improve” them and ourselves.

I wish to draw attention to the following problem:

the idea of happiness presupposes that at present we are unhappy.

Kosho Uchiyama Roshi

What we do in meditation

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Each separate being
in the universe
returns to (a) common source.


Returning to the source
is serenity.

Lao Tzu