We tend to bestow our judging mind with unquestioned power and authority, but this risks an inaccurate self-perception. Instead, listen and question, without believing every word. Take back your right to evaluate the credibility of judgments and your own self-worth. By clarifying your relationship to the judging mind, you can reclaim your power to establish a more accurate self-perception and stable sense of well-being.
Mark Coleman, From Suffering to Peace: The True Promise of Mindfulness
From William Stafford, A Ritual to Read to Each Other:
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
And I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind….
Seeing a person free of everything we thought of him or her is a most extraordinary event. Things become luminous. We realize our common nature of no-nature. This is seeing from the heart – compassion.
Katherine Thanas, The Truth of This Life
Everything that happens to you is your teacher…
the secret is to learn to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it.
Polly Berrien Berends, 1940 – 2017, Writer and sculptor
Thoughts evoke emotions, tensions, excitement and stress, and can bring on exhaustion and sickness. Awareness reveals this simply to be so. Awareness is freedom from wanting to improve oneself or to put oneself down. It … opens one up to whatever else is happening this instant: breathing, a bird singing, a motor humming, the wind blowing, thoughts moving, the body tensing and relaxing…
Toni Packer
A monk asked Shito “How does one become free?”. Shito replied, “Who has bound you?”
That’s the question, who binds you? Don’t look outside, look into the mind, investigate the opinionated mind. Become familiar with its opinions and judgments; then you wont be so vulnerable to them. Our effort is to release the mind from its ordinary opinions and see revealed a new universe. Nothing binds us but the habituated mind.
Katherine Thanas, The Truth of This Life
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