If you think that peace and happiness are somewhere else and you run after them, you will never arrive. It is only when you realize that peace and happiness are available here in the present moment that you will be able to relax. In daily life, there is much to do and so little time. You may feel pressured to run all the time. Just stop! Touch the ground of the present moment deeply, and you will touch real peace and joy.
Thich Nhat Hanh
A new home decoration show starts on the Irish television channel this evening. The popularity of shows like this at the moment – or ones which look at houses abroad or down the country – and which start when people are a bit down after the Summer holidays, can fuel the anxious, comparing mind. Even how you decorate your home becomes a sign of how well you are doing, or another way to feel that you do not match up:
The need to be normal is the predominant anxiety disorder
in modern life.
Thomas Moore, Original Self
Pain is inevitable; lives come with pain. Suffering is not inevitable. If suffering is what happens when we struggle with our experience because of our inability to accept it, then suffering is an optional extra.
Sylvia Boorstein, It’s Easier than you Think
The common myth that is perpetuated in society is that the normal person is happy, balanced and integrated – otherwise there is something wrong with them; maybe they’re mentally unstable. We’re even alarmed by unhappy people. Everyone in the media is smiling and cheerful. The politicians are all smiling, cheerful. confident; funeral homes even make the corpses up to look smiling, cheerful and confident…… Unhappiness in Western culture is often treated as a sign of failure.
Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth
photo Stephen Sweeeney
Gentle, slow, walking – best done in nature – sends a signal to the brain and by slowing down the body we slow down the rushing mind. It can put things in perspective and prevent us from living all the time in our heads:
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
hills and a cloud.
Wallace Stevens, Of the Surface of Things
If you notice the wonderful smell of the rain, instead of just moving quickly past the experience without deeply appreciating it, you can prolong your contact with this wonderful sensation. Pause for a moment and really let yourself experience the smell of the rain. If you are struck by the blueness of the sky, linger for a moment and breathe mindfully, taking in the wonderful blue color. Don’t rush past these marvelous experiences, treating them as if they are unimportant. To treat them as unimportant is ultimately to treat yourself as unimportant. This is your life: enjoy it!
Thomas Bien
photo bryancalabro
Kindness strikes a resonance with the depths of your own heart; it also suggests that your vulnerability, though somehow exposed, is not taken advantage of; rather, it has become an occasion for dignity and empathy. Kindness casts a different light, an evening light that has the depth of color and patience to illuminate what is complex and rich in difference. Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the instinct that at the deepest level of reality some intimate kindness holds sway. This is the heart of blessing. To believe in blessing is to believe that our being here, our very presence in the world, is itself the first gift, the primal blessing. As Rilke says: Hier zu sein ist so viel — to be here is immense. To be created and come to birth is to be blessed. Some primal kindness chose us and brought us through the forest of dreaming until we could emerge into the clearance of individuality, with a path of life opening before us through the world.
John O Donohue
Mindfulbalance 