Essential for working with what is unknown is an attitude of unknowing.
This leaves room for the phenomenon itself to speak.
It alone may keep us from delusions
James Hilmann, The Dream and the Underworld
photo: Solveig Askjem
Month: May 2013
Simple presence
Moments of natural meditation are happening to us all the time. We pause at a stop sign while driving or taking a walk, just for a moment, preoccupations of that important meeting tomorrow or memories of yesterday’s flood of emails fall away. We are simply there, noticing other walkers and drivers, cars and sunlight, clouds and trees. A dog barks, and in the distance we hear a siren. For a fleeting moment we have a more intense experience of simple presence.
Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Wakefulness
Open to being surprised
Our capacity for surprise is often an unused blessing. With every appearance, it prods us to ask, “Beneath our problem-solving, what is life asking of us”? “Beneath our ideas of happiness or suffering, what does it really mean to live”? So often we try to change things, only to find that our honest engagement with experience often changes us. In trying to make life fit our needs, our sense of need is often softened or broken, until we fit life.
Mark Nepo, The Gift of Surprise
Photo: Steve Evans, Monastery Door, Ladakh,
…. being and doing
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence, there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling in the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth. If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have not rest, God does not bless our work. If we twist our lives out of shape in order to fill every corner of them with action and experience, God will seem silently to withdraw from our hearts and leave us empty.
Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island
photo : jon rawlinson
Balance…
Happiness is not a matter of intensity,
but balance
Thomas Merton
photo Stephanie de Nadai
Our changing mind
What could be more unpredictable than our thoughts and emotions: do you have any idea what you are going to think or feel next? Our mind, in fact, is as empty, as impermanent, and as transient as a dream. Look at a thought: It comes, it stays, and it goes. The past is past, the future not yet risen, and even the present thought, as we experience it, becomes the past.
The only thing we really have is nowness, is now.
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Mindfulbalance 