Meditation is an experiment we are making, bringing us out of our normal habits of intense self-judgment, comparing, and impatience. Mindfulness isn’t about what is happening; it is about how we are relating to what is happening — how much awareness, balance and compassion we are bringing to this moment’s experience, whatever it is.
Sharon Salzberg
The moment in which the mind acknowledges ‘This isn’t what I wanted, but it’s what I got’, is the point at which suffering disappears. Sadness might remain present, but the mind … is free to console, free to support the mind’s acceptance of the situation, free to allow space for new possibilities to come into view.
Sylvia Boorstein, Happiness is an Inside Job
This is what it means to be young:
This faith in the most beautiful surprises,
this joy in daily discovery.
Rilke
To ask, what is your story? is to be obliged to ask what are your stories, for we are no single narrative. What is humbling is the acknowledgment through age, repetition and the growth of consciousness that we have less autonomy in the construction of our lives than we had fantasized. In the end, the chief result of a long-term analysis is not a solution to our dilemma, for life is not a problem, but a progressive unfolding of mystery. The joyful discovery is that our lives become more interesting to us as we discern that we are part of a larger mystery. This is a proper relocation of the ego from its imperial fantasy to its unique, personal place. We become amazed witnesses of the great theater wherein we play our part, and are reminded of the progressive incarnation which occurs in even the most modest of moments.
James Hollis, Mythologems.
That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning:
‘Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?’
Mary Oliver, Foreword, Long Life: Essays and other Writing
The best-adjusted person in our society is the person who is not dead and not alive, just numb. When you are fully alive you are constantly saying “No” to many of the processes of society, the racism, the polluted environment, the nuclear threat, the arms race, drinking unsafe water and eating carcinogenic foods. Thus it is in the interest of society to promote those things that take the edge off, keep us busy with our fixes, and keep us slightly numbed-out and zombie-like. In this way our modern consumer society itself functions like an addict.
Anne Wilson Schaef, When Society Becomes an Addict
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