At the end of the day, we discover that humility
– the strength to separate our sense of the meaning of life from what we do –
is the only real answer to lifelong happiness.
Joan Chittister, Aspects of the Heart
photo xlibber
Month: October 2013
Saturday: step back…
Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.
Lao Tzu, The Tao Te Ching
photo stu spivack
….leads to freedom
Sometimes it takes a great sky
to find that
small, bright and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.
David Whyte, The Journey
Noticing space…
Noticing the space around people and things provides a different way of looking at them, and developing this spacious view is a way of opening oneself. When one has a spacious mind, there is room for everything. When one has a narrow mind, there is room for only a few things.
Ajahn Sumedho
Keeping in touch with an underlying truth
Unless that underground level of the self is preserved as a verified and verifying element in your make-up, you are going to be in danger of settling into whatever profile the world prepares for you and accepting whatever profile the world provides for you. You’ll be in danger of molding yourselves in accordance with laws of growth other than those of your own intuitive being.
Seamus Heaney
Working with our “stuff” today
Can we see our ‘stuff’ just for what it is, rather than making it into a big ‘me’ and ‘my problem’ – the things I’ve got to work out, resolve, fix, get beyond, get rid of; thinking about what I’m lacking or what I’ve got obstructing me. All this stuff! It’s really just the play of the mind… has causes and conditions for its existence. It’s the stuff of the world. And, it’s the stuff that we learn from, actually. If we don’t acknowledge suffering, if we aren’t aware of suffering,then where do we find the energy to understand it and go beyond it? In other words, whatever we’ve got to work with, it’s the stuff of awakening – if we can find the right relationship to it.
Ajahn Jitindriya, The Stuff of Awakening
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