Beyond our incessant thinking

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In stopping,  looking and listening, in giving ourselves over to all our senses, including mind, we are in that moment embodying what we hold sacred in life. In such moments, we transcend who we think we are. We go beyond our stories and our incessant thinking, however deep and important it sometimes is. There, we reside in the seeing of what is here to be seen and the direct, non-conceptual knowing of what is here to be known, which we don’t have to seek because it is already and always here. We rest in awareness, in the knowing itself which includes not knowing as well.

Jon Kabat Zinn

photo 松岡明芳

Many directions

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When we live superficially, we are always outside ourselves, never quite ‘with’ ourselves, always divided and pulled in many directions –  we find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we do not really mean, needing things we do not really need, exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and without meaning in our lives. “Why spend your money on what is not food and your earnings on what fails to satisfy?” (Isaiah 55)

Thomas Merton, Love and Living

photo Highways agency

Sunday Quote: Can we just be?

cow2Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something.

All your life you have been going after something, pursuing some goal.

Enlightenment is dropping all that.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Seeing through others eyes

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We often find ourselves relating to people or to events through patterns inherited from our past and these prevent us from being fully open to the actual experience in front of us:

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand,

nor look through the eyes of the dead,

nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things  from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Give up comparing

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Everyone should sit firmly anchored in the place

where there is no better and worse.

Kodo Sawaki, 1880 – 1965, Japanese Sōtō Zen teacher

At the door

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In practicing equanimity, we train in widening our circle of understanding and compassion to include the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. It is more a matter of being fully engaged with whatever comes to our door. We could call it being completely alive. Training in equanimity requires that we leave behind some baggage: the comfort of rejecting whole parts of our experience, for example and the security of welcoming only what is pleasant. The courage to continue with this unfolding process comes from self-compassion and from giving ourselves plenty of time. If we continue to practice this way over the months and years, we will feel our hearts and minds grow bigger. When people ask me how long this will take, I say, “At least until you die.”

Pema Chodron,  The places that scare you