Be gentle with yourself. Be kind to yourself.
You may not be perfect, but you are all you’ve got to work with.
The process of becoming who you will be begins first with the
total acceptance of who you are.
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
photo hunterdt
You should not take personally things that actually aren’t personal.
It turns out when you start to really dig down underneath it, there’s very little that’s personal.
Taking things personally is a prescription for infinite suffering.
Jon Kabat Zinn
photo of cows disturbing a walk along the beach at Whitepark Bay, Ireland, by gtapp
This mind of ours is naturally peaceful. It’s still and calm like a leaf that is not being blown about by the wind…
Why the mind doesn’t feel peaceful right now is because it gets lost in its own moods. There’s nothing to mind itself. It simply abides in its natural state, that’s all. That sometimes the mind feels peaceful and other times not peaceful is because it has been tricked by moods. The untrained mind lacks wisdom. Moods come and trick it into feeling pleasure one minute and suffering the next. Happiness then sadness. But the natural state of a person’s mind isn’t one of happiness or sadness. This experience of happiness and sadness is not the actual mind itself, but just these moods which have tricked it. The mind gets lost, carried away by these moods with no idea what’s happening. It still isn’t very clever. And we go on thinking that it’s our mind which is suffering or our mind which is happy, when actually it’s just lost in its various moods.
Ajahn Chah, Training this Mind
In meditation practice we are cultivating a mind that knows rather than judges. In other words, it has enough space to hold what is happening, without it triggering reactions or negative stories about how our lives are. I find the image in this passage to be a help toward developing that:
As a bee gathering nectar
does not harm or disturb
the colour and fragrance of the flower;
so does a wise person move
through the world.
The Dhammapada, v 49
photo Andrea Westmoreland
The more we connect with a bigger perspective,
the more we connect with energetic joy.
Pema Chödrön
Sun rising over Alps at dawn
The weekend can allow us get out into nature and into its pace, learning its balance and wisdom. It is a useful corrective to the speed which modern society – and workplaces – consider necessary, and to the importance which it places on passing trends:
The internal activity of analysis, speculation, memory, investigation, cross-referencing, decision-making, and self-evaluation can amount to a volume of overwhelming proportions. Then the experience of overload develops into one of exhaustion, or of a pressure in our lives that diminishes peace and joy… This is the loss of balance that we can rightly experience as being flooded.
It isn’t the world per se, nor is it that we are chronically unbalanced;
it’s just that the right relationship hasn’t been struck.
Ajahn Sucitto, Parami
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure
with a liberal allowance of time.
Henry David Thoreau
photo of the Mourne mountains, County Down by ardfern
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