Month: May 2014

The simplest practice

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File:A U.S. Air Force trainee gasps for breath after completing the underwater swim portion of his physical ability and stamina test at Little Rock Air Force Base, Ark., June 2, 2010 100602-F-MM528-122.jpg

That is the wonderful thing about the breathing, and the reason it is such a helpful object of attention. It is both perfectly ordinary (we are all doing it, all the time) and extremely special (if we weren’t doing it, we’d be dead)… Everybody breathes. It is also extremely portable. We take it everywhere we go. So if you choose to practice with the breathing, it has the advantage of always being there. No matter how many times you forget it throughout the day, you can always take it up again. There’s another in-breath. There’s an out-breath.

Larry Rosenberg, Breath by Breath

Learning from water

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Edenpics-com_005-093-Sacred-Water-lily-also-called-Blue-Lotus-Indian-Lotus-or-Bean-of-India.75200328I want the way

the water sees without eyes,
hears without ears,
shivers without will or fear
at the gentlest touch.
 
I want the way it
accepts the cold moonlight
and lets it pass,
the way it lets
all of it pass
without judgment or comment.
 
There is a lake,
Lalla Ded sang, no larger
than one seed of mustard,
that all things return to.
O heart, if you
will not, cannot, give me the lake,
then give me the song.

from Jane Hirshfield, Lake and Maple

Depth and richness

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Settle down in your room at a moment when you have nothing else to do. Say “I am now with myself,” and just sit with yourself. After an amazingly short time you will most likely feel bored. This teaches us one very useful thing. It gives us insight into the fact that if after ten minutes of being alone with ourselves we feel like that, it is no wonder that others should feel equally bored! Why is this so? It is so because we have so little to offer to our own selves as food for thought, for emotion and for life. If you watch your life carefully you will discover quite soon that we hardly ever live from within outwards; instead we respond to incitement, to excitement. In other words, we live by reaction… We are completely empty, we do not act from within ourselves but accept as our life a life which is actually fed in from the outside; we are used to things happening which compel us to do other things. How seldom can we live simply by means of the depth and the richness we assume that there is within ourselves.

Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Learning to Pray

With our flaws

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File:Twisted tree - geograph.org.uk - 1167885.jpg
We don’t have to hate ourselves for our own vulnerability. We don’t have to hate ourselves for what life has done to us.
We don’t have to hate ourselves because hurt or loss or longing has gotten to us. Our desires will always be with us in some form, keeping us firmly attached to a world that will hurt us.

We must come to love ourselves, love our life in its vulnerability, in its impermanence, not in spite of all its flaws, but because of them

Because the vulnerability, the changes, the flaws,  make us who we are.

 
Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness
photo: alan Murray-Rust

Complete

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No creature ever falls short of its own completion.

Wherever it stands it does not fail to cover the ground

Dogen

Our true nature

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feet_on_ground_640x480

The death of the self may be full of the fear of letting go, of stepping off into the void, thinking that nothing will stop our fall, not recognizing that the void is our true nature. The void is the vastness in which we are occurring, it is the truth itself, and the whole idea of “someone” stepping off is just another bubble passing through. And we don’t any longer need to define who we are, because who we become each moment is so much more than what we ever imagined. There’s no need to limit who we really are with any definition. We are all of it. And only the contents of this vastness of mind, once identified with as a separate self, limit who we are.

Steven Levine, A Gradual Awakening