How much of the day are you aware – just basically aware of what life is presenting – rather than being lost in waking sleep, in being identified with whatever you’re doing, almost as if you didn’t exist?How much of your energy is used to fortify a particular self-image, or to simply please others in order to gain approval, instead of devoting your energy to living a genuine life?
Ezra Bayda, At Home in the Muddy Water
It is our interest in our experiences that enables us to become insightful, understanding and wise regarding them…By looking at our mundane and unacceptable experiences with an interested and open mind, insight, understanding and investigation can actually be fostered.
Jason Siff
Like everyone I’d rather not experience the undercurrents of life, but the challenge is not to shun them, but to accept that over a lifetime will have our share of them. Avoiding the difficult aspects of living only stunts our fullness. When we do this we are like a tree that never fully opens to the sky. And dwelling on our difficulties only prevents them from going on their way. When we do this, we are like a great tree that nets the storm in its leaves. The storm by its nature wants to move on and the trees’ grace is that it has no hands. Our blessing and curse is to learn and relearn when to reach and to hold, and when to put our hands in our pockets.
Mark Nepo, The Book Of Awakening
Pleasant conditions change into unpleasant ones, and unpleasant conditions eventually become pleasant. We should just keep this awareness of impermanence and be at peace with the way things are, not demanding that they be otherwise. But most of all we should be at peace with ourselves – that is the big lesson to learn in life. It is really hard to be at peace with oneself. I find that most people have a lot of self-aversion. It is much better to be at peace with our own bodies and minds than anything else, and not demand that they be perfect, that we be perfect, or that everything be good. We can be at peace with the good and the bad.
Ajahn Sumedho
Photo Harald Hoyer
There was this friend who came to me every afternoon about four o’clock, sat me down in a chair in the living room, took off my shoes and socks and massaged my feet. He hardly ever said anything. He was a Quaker elder. And yet out of his intuitive sense, from time to time would say a very brief word like, ‘I can feel your struggle today,’ or farther down the road, ‘I feel that you’re a little stronger at this moment, and I’m glad for that.’ But beyond that, he would say hardly anything. He would give no advice. Somehow he found the one place in my body, namely the soles of my feet, where I could experience some sort of connection to another human being.
What he mainly did for me, of course, was to be willing to be present to me in my suffering. He just hung in with me in this very quiet, very simple, very tactile way. And it became for me a metaphor of the kind of community we need to extend to people who are suffering in this way, which is a community that is neither invasive of the mystery nor evasive of the suffering but is willing to hold people in a space, a sacred space of relationship, where somehow this person who is on the dark side of the moon can get a little confidence that they can come around to the other side.
Parker Palmer
Perhaps the earth can teach us
As when everything seems dead
And later proves to be alive
Pablo Neruda
Mindfulbalance 