What arises in one’s mind is not something we can control. We can change the ground, to some extent, out of which emotions tend to arise, but we can’t stop things from coming up. Every moment is conditions coming together and coming apart. How we relate to what arises in one’s mind is what’s most important.
Sharon Salzberg
Our awareness of our depth of being is fleeting. Yet just because we close our eyes doesn’t mean the sun has disappeared. And just because we can’t keep the unquestionable fact of being alive in view doesn’t mean that the inherent vitality of life has disappeared. We are more than what happens to us. We are more than what we think or fear. The turbulence we encounter is very real, but underneath what happens to us is the inherent, unwavering fact of life filling us from within.
Mark Nepo, Our Authority of Being
Letting there be room for not knowing
is the most important thing of all.
Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart
The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal center of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature.
We think we need to hold everything close….to know where everything is going.
But probably, in life, the most important skill to learn is….
There are poets who learn from you
to say, what you, in your aloneness, are;
and they learn through you to live distantness,
as the evenings through the great stars
become accustomed to eternity.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Girls
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Mindfulbalance 