Autumn means letting go. A good place to start is with self-critical thoughts:
Stop.
Be silent.
When thought has no customers, thought vanishes.
Nisargadatta Maharaj 1897 – 1981
Year: 2017
We cannot do everything
It is good to tune into the energy of each season and live in harmony with it. In autumn we move from the expansive nature of summer to a more internal, introspective focus, setting limits, conserving and harvesting. A good time to let go of the unrealistic demands we place on ourselves.
There is a Japanese saying: The elbow does not bend outward.
It is a smart saying. The freedom of the elbow, the wonderfulness of the elbow, is precisely because of its limitations. This is our awakened attitude. We are free to be completely human. We are not free to be aliens or cartoon creatures.
We are free to be ourselves, with all of our imperfections and bruises.
Jason Shulman, The Instruction Manual for Receiving God
Sunday Quote: The start of Autumn
Don’t prolong the past,
don’t invite the future,
don’t be deceived by appearances,
just dwell in present awareness.
Patrul Rinpoche
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
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
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
Mindfulbalance 