If I were to begin life again, I should want it as it was.
I would only open my eyes a little more
Jules Renard, 1864 – 1910, French author
Month: May 2014
Running just to stand still
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
The Red Queen, in Through the Looking Glass
photo trishna datta
Being awake
There’s not a good way to come into meditation or a bad way to come into meditation. It might feel preferable to show up feeling calm and spacious, but really meditation is about being awake and present to whatever is going on. You can’t critique your meditation in terms of good and bad. The only thing you can measure your meditation against is the question: “Was I present or not?” And even then, to say to yourself that you weren’t present is a result of the fact that you’ve been meditating and you recognized that fact. There’s some sense of awareness about what is actually happening.
Pema Chodron, How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with your mind
Our restless heart
I love you, gentlest of Ways,
who ripened us as we wrestled with you.
you, the great homesickness we could never shake off,
you, the forest that always surrounded us,
you, the song we sang in every silence,
you dark net threading through us,
on the day you made us you created yourself,
and we grew sturdy in your sunlight…
let your hand rest on the rim of heaven now and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, translation anita barrows and joanna macy
Losing touch with the real
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts,
so he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusion.
Alan Watts
Another passing thing
Clinging is weakened by the activity of meditation. For example, we sit quietly and experience the flow of feeling, the dependent and changing experience of our bodily form, and all the “I should do it” programs twitching in the mind. And through meditating we can unhook the reactions and reflex-activities by focusing on their changeability. This practice, although based on ethics and sense-restraint, doesn’t attempt to affect the topics that the mind is carrying in its perceptions and volitions….so that whatever our impulse or perception is, it’s just seen as another passing thing.
Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth
Mindfulbalance 