Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which garden we will tend … When we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives, but when we are grateful for the abundance that is present — love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure – the illusion of wasteland falls away and we experience heaven on earth.
Sarah Ban Breathnach
photo takashi hososhima
[Our] knowing awareness gets lost when we cling to states of mind, because these are always in motion. We get pulled off balance by emotionally powered thoughts that demand that we follow them, fix them, get rid of them or worry about them. So we have to learn to undo the habit of reaching for, adopting or clinging. You can never satisfy a driven mind. A wise person is someone who can give up the ranting of the self to find a more natural tune; they can see the clamouring and the clutching, the fearing and the grasping, are unnecessary and not worth hosting.
Ajahn Sucitto, Parami
We often go through our day or our life with our defenses up…
I seemed to hear God saying, “Put down your gun and we’ll talk.”
C.S. Lewis
I follow four principles:
Face it,
Accept it,
Deal with it,
Then let it go.
Sheng Yen, 1930 – 2009, Chinese Buddhist monk
One learns only one thing,
how to rejoice in life.
Osho
I want to mention summer ending
without meaning the death of somebody loved
or even the death of the trees.
Today in the market I heard a mother say
Look at the pumpkins, it’s finally autumn!
And the child didn’t think of the death of her mother
which is due before her own but tasted the sound
of the words on her clumsy tongue:
pumpkin; autumn.
Let the eye enlarge with all it beholds.
I want to celebrate color, how one red leaf
flickers like a match held to a dry branch,
and the whole world goes up in orange and gold.
Linda Pastan
Mindfulbalance 