Don’t prolong the past,
don’t invite the future,
don’t be deceived by appearances,
just dwell in present awareness.
Patrul Rinpoche
Month: September 2017
Never sitting still
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.
They will practice yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.
Carl Jung
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Let go of unworthiness
The sense of unworthiness, it seems, comes out of our being talked out of, trained out of, conditioned out of trusting our natural being. It is the result of being turned away from ourselves, taught to distrust ourselves. We are worthy of letting go of our unworthiness. If we did nothing but practice letting go of unworthiness, much of the stuff we’re working so hard to clear away would have no support system. We would have more room to grow. Consciously we surrender unworthiness as it arises, not entertaining it with the ego’s list of credits. the work which will awaken us is that of becoming keenly aware of unworthiness without judging it.
Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening
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Balance
It is not always easy to maintain a tranquil and balanced mind when work pressures mount, or we have a lot of evaluation reports to complete. Resting in awareness by stepping out of the story line is a good thing to do, even for a few moments every hour.
Anyone can restore some degree of balance
between thinking and awareness
right in this present moment,
which is the only moment that any of us ever has anyway.
Jon Kabat Zinn
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An empty mind
To see the empty nature of mind is liberating. It’s like a room full of furniture. Originally the room is empty. The furniture is brought in piece by piece. The person living there knows that anything they brought into the room can also be taken out — chairs, beds, tables, and so on. Similarly anything brought into the mind by prior causes and conditions can be taken out — afflictive emotions… all kinds of suffering. Nothing is stuck. This empty nature is the direct route to freedom. Once we know it, it is only a question of doing the work. As Suzuki Roshi put it, “People who know the state of emptiness will always be able to dissolve their problems by constancy.” Constancy here means continuing with our practice of right effort. Once we know the peace of an empty mind, we only need to keep letting go of the sources of suffering. The field of awareness, like vast space, is intrinsically empty.
Guy Amstrong, in his new book, Emptiness, A Practical Guide for Meditators
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In face of our fears
If we realize that our greatest enemy is fear
and what it does to us, and how much it launches these automatic protective programs,
then we realize that there’s a kind of daily summons to stand up in face of our fears
and risk being who we are and risk potential loss of our comfort zones
and the consensual approval that every child needs,
but which becomes a kind of constrictive burden for the adult
James Hollis
Mindfulbalance 