Month: May 2013

Sometimes we take quite a journey – physically or mentally or emotionally – when the very love and happiness we want so much can be found by just sitting down. We spend our lives searching for something we think we don’t have, something that will make us happy. But the key to our deepest happiness lies in changing our vision of where to seek it. As the great Japanese poet and Zen master Hakuin said, “Not knowing how near the Truth is, people seek it far away. What a pity! They are like one who, in the midst of water, cries out in thirst so imploringly.”

Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness

What if you are already complete? What if it were possible to hold the whole of it in awareness and allow it to be just as it already is. That would be an incredibly radical act and it would be an act of profound wisdom […] But actually investigate the way things actually are, and you might find that inside of the sadness, the grief, the despair lies something else too — lies some kind of beauty, some kind of humanity, some kind of human understanding, that understands that things are impermanent, that nothing stays the same, that there is loss, that it is not possible to control the whole universe, that even in terms of our body, this is something that is to a large extent a mystery — but it’s not all ugly, it’s not all black. Even in the midst of utter darkness, there’s this other element of beauty, of symmetry, of the natural world.

Jon Kabat Zinn.