It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Wendall Berry, The Real Work
Imagine taking a very small glass of water and putting into it a teaspoon of salt. Because of the small size of the container, the teaspoon of salt is going to have a big impact upon the water. However, if you approach a much larger body of water, such as a lake, and put into it that same teaspoonful of salt, it will not have the same intensity of impact, because of the vastness and openness of the vessel receiving it. Even when the salt remains the same, the spaciousness of the vessel receiving it changes everything. We spend a lot of our lives looking for a feeling of safety or protection; we try to alter the amount of salt that comes our way. Ironically, the salt is the very thing that we cannot do anything about, as life changes and offers us repeated ups and downs. Our true work is to create a container so immense that any amount of salt, even a truckload, can come into it without affecting our capacity to receive it. No situation, even an extreme one, then can mandate a particular reaction.
Sharon Salzberg, LovingKindness
The part of the mind that creates products is not the part of the mind that can grant us any lasting sense of happiness. The narrow often unconscious definition of humanity as primarily a producer and creator of products is fundamentally misconceived. All good art forms remind us of the broader horizons of existence that make sense of any of its particular artifacts …..The contemplative disciplines … are simply ways of learning to pay a profound attention to these outer patterns through disciplining the breath and the body at the same time. Eventually we learn not to choose between the inner and the outer world but live at a powerful frontier between these inner and outer correspondences.
David Whyte
I have discovered, just as my teachers always told me, that we already have what we need. The wisdom, the strength, the confidence, the awakened heart and mind are always accessible, here, now, always. We are just uncovering them. We are rediscovering them. We’re not inventing them or importing them from somewhere else. They’re here. That’s why when we feel caught in darkness, suddenly the clouds can part. Out of nowhere we cheer up or relax or experience the vastness of our minds. No one else gives this to you. People will support you and help you with teachings and practices, as they have supported and helped me, but you yourself experience your unlimited potential.
Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap.
What I encourage is a moving toward simplicity, rather than complexity. We’re already complicated personalities. Our cultural and social conditioning is usually very complicated. We’re educated and literate, which means that we know a lot and have a lot of experience. This means that we are no longer simple. We’ve lost the simplicity that we had as children and have become rather complicated characters….What is most simple is to wake up – it’s as simple as that. The most profound teaching is the phrase “wake up”. Hearing this, one then asks, “what am I supposed to do next?” We complicate it again because we’re not used to being really awake and fully present. We’re used to thinking about things and analyzing them; trying to get something or get rid of something; achieving and attaining.
Ajahn Sumedho, Intuitive Awareness
Let everything happen to you:
beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.
Rilke, Book of Hours
Mindfulbalance 