When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence.
How can you love if you are not there?
Thich Nhat Hanh
photo nha le hoan
Month: June 2015
This modern world
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock
photo ananta bhadra lamichhane
Competely in the moment
If you can pour a cup of tea right,
you can do anything
Gurdjieff
photo saitowitz
What seems solid
It is in running away from our “monsters” that we make them seem so solid. Whatever we resist exerts a strong hold on us: in solidifying it, we empower it to stay in our mind and our life. But when we cultivate the willingness to be with life just as it is, our relationship to what we’ve avoided starts to change. Once we see through the solidity of our resistance, our lives become more fluid and workable. We’re able to move beyond where we were once stuck. Even if we don’t like our life as it is, we don’t need to wage war against it. We can start meeting our resistance squarely by noticing all of the ways in which we avoid the present moment, the ways in which we avoid practice, the ways in which we resist what is. Understanding the depth of our resistance is of major importance in furthering our practice.
Ezra Bayda, Breaking Through
Creating a gap
It isn’t the things that happen to us that cause us to suffer;
it’s how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.
photo of a robin sheltering from the wind and the rain by phil sangwell
Familiar stories
We can have a lot of stories about how our lives are heading, or what our strengths and weaknesses are, or why things are not going as the should go…
One of the most beautifully disturbing questions we can ask, is whether a given story we tell about our lives is actually true, and whether the opinions we go over every day have any foundation or are things we repeat to ourselves simply so that we will continue to play the game. It can be quite disorientating to find that a story we have relied on is not only not true – it never was true…In fact, the continued retelling of it simply imprisons us. We are used to the prison, however, we have indeed fitted cushions and armchairs and made it comfortable and have locked the door from the inside.
David Whyte, Letter from the House, Winter 2012
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