The great Suzuki Roshi’s classic image on how meditation develops space in our lives and allows us work with whatever challenging thoughts arise:
The way to control your sheep or cow is
to give him a large, spacious meadow .
Month: May 2019
Complaining
See if you can catch yourself complaining in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge.
When you complain, you make yourself a victim.
Leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
Eckhart Tolle
Sunday Quote: Joy in an incomplete world
This morning, thousands rose early to catch the birdsong at dawn in an annual celebration entitled “Dawn Chorus Day” which went out live on radio from locations all over the world
A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer,
it sings because it has a song.
Maya Angelou
No plans
There must be a time of day when the man who
makes plans forgets his plans,
and acts as if he had no plans at all.
There must be a time of day when the man who has
to speak falls very silent.
And his mind forms no more propositions,
and he asks himself:
Did they have a meaning?
There must be a time
When the man of prayer goes to pray
as if it were the first time in his life
he had ever prayed,
when the man of resolutions puts his
resolutions aside
as if they had all been broken,
and he learns a different wisdom:
distinguishing the sun from the moon,
the stars from the darkness,
the sea from the dry land,
and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.
Thomas Merton
Better to give
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love:
The more they give, the more they possess.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Balance
25% of Irish people check work emails while on holidays. 49% of Irish people between 25 and 34 check social media overnight if they can’t sleep.
Irish Times, Signs of the Times Survey 2019, April 27, 2019.
What is balance in a society whose skewing of time has it totally off-balance? What is balance in a culture that has destroyed the night with perpetual light and keeps equipment going twenty-four hours a day because it is more costly to turn machines on and of than it is to pay people to run them at strange and difficult hours? In the first place balance for us is obviously not a mathematical division of the day. For most of us our days simply do not divide that easily. In the second place, balance for us is clearly not equivalence. Because I have done forty hours of work this week does not mean that I will have forty hours of prayer and leisure. What it does mean, however, is that somehow I must make time for both. I must make time or die inside.
Joan Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily
Mindfulbalance 