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
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
The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited.
Everything has its own voice.
Somehow we have become autistic.
We don’t hear the voices.
Thomas Berry
Meditation is really about paying attention, and the only way in which we can pay attention is through our senses, all of them, including the mind. Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience. Of course, our experience is vast, and includes our own body, our mind, our heart, and the entire world.
Jon Kabat Zinn
This quote comes from a different tradition than the meditation quote earlier, but is essentially saying the same thing. It is from Charlotte Selver, an extraordinary woman and one of the greatest influences on body-orientated psychotherapy today. She lived a long life – was teaching still at age 101 – and emphasized that we should being fully present in each moment, seeing it as completely new, being open to all the riches it could contain. This requires a full commitment, not standing on the fence, not watching the moments with tired eyes. She taught this by teaching movement in the body, being fully in touch which its action:
It is not first this, then this, then that – the whole person comes into motion.
There is nowhere where it stays as is, when I begin to allow movement.
When you have to laugh, there’s nowhere where you don’t laugh. Or you are only partly involved with laughing?
Nowhere, when you are crying, where it isn’t crying in you.
Does that make sense?
In other words, to give myself to something means not to go point by point.
Charlotte Selver
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