Month: September 2022

One breath

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Life may not always offer the conditions to rest in the ways we long for. A nap or afternoon in the park would be delightful, but raising kids, working two jobs, caregiving for others compete for our time and energy. Nonetheless, we can all learn to touch the stillness of being for even short moments.

Our breath can teach us how simple and natural it is to rest: the body breathes in, receiving vitality. The body breathes out, releasing and letting go. 

What’s it like to pause and rest for even one breath?

Oren Jay Sofer

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Insisting and contracting

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What is craving? Basically, experientially, it’s contracting onto a wish and getting insistent about it. A highly insistent contracting around something we want. And we can include in that things we don’t want also, because not wanting something is wanting something to be absent. Or wanting something to be different.

So, if we want to suffer less, we need to find where we are getting insistent and contracted around how we would like things to be. So don’t look at the suffering and say: I want that to stop. Look for craving instead…. try to find it, and just leave it at that for now. Just see the craving, and let it be. If we can just learn to do that, that’s a great big lesson.

Henry Shukman, Mountain Cloud Zen Center Blog

Who is in control?

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The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive.

To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly – you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease.

You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
 

Eckhart Tolle

Never stops

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In case you haven’t noticed, you have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops. It just keeps going and going. Have you ever wondered why it talks in there? How does it decide what to say and when to say it? How much of what it says turns out to be true? How much of what it says is even important? And if right now you are hearing, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any voice inside my head!” – that’s the voice we’re talking about.

Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul

A new day, a new week

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Is it possible to meet each other or to meet the flower, the bird, or the new day without anything interfering?

And if the past does come up, to see that it is memory coming up? And not be ruled by it, not be compelled and narrowed down by it? To see it and to wonder whether it has to interfere?

Toni Parker