Month: July 2019

Anxiety

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If you’re human, you experience anxiety. The choice is whether to experience anxiety in the service of neurosis or in the service of waking up….We can invest in denying the truth of our vulnerabilities, thereby gaining pseudo-security at the cost of chronic anxiety. Or we can commit to experiencing our vulnerabilities moment by moment, gaining confidence that we can work with whatever arises- anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, etc. Either way, there’s anxiety. Own the embodied intensity as a valid part of your life and be kind to this experience.  

Bruce Tift, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation

Just sit

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I was passionate,
filled with longing,
I searched
far and wide.
 
But the day
that the Truthful One
found me,
I was at home.
Lal Ded, 14th-century Kashmiri saint and mystic poet

Not the form we expect

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All life worth living is difficult, nobody promised us happiness;

it is not a commodity you have earned, or shall ever earn.

It is a by-product of brave living, and it never comes in the form we expect, or at the season we hoped for, or as the result of our planning for it.

Katherine Anne Porter  1890 –  1980, American journalist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist.

The witness

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There is one technique which is known as adopting the role of the witness – and holding onto that role – ultimately, to the exclusion of all roles. The witness is not evaluative. It does not judge your actions. It merely notes them.  This point is important. Most of the time the inner voices of most people are continually evaluative. “I’m good for doing this” or “I’m bad for doing that.” You must make that evaluative role an object of contemplation as well. Keep in mind that the witness does not care whether you become enlightened or not. It merely notes how it all is.

Ram Daas, Be Here Now

Letting go of self development

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When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves – from other people, relationships, or material goods – or from our own self-development, we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion. But according to Buddhism, such a strategy is doomed. 

Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.

Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

Sunday Quote: Inside ourselves

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There are people who are unhappy regardless of the work they do

or the relationship they are in,

and yet they continuously fool themselves into thinking

that an external makeover will affect them internally.

Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment