Take a pause

The mental and emotional ‘pause’, the open state, allows the topic of one’s expectation to go down like the sun – and arise again in a fresh light. One can then pick up the thread of what one was doing or talking about with a fresh mind and a shift in perspective – or one can decide to drop it. There’s an opportunity for a transformative choice.

Because unless you’ve deliberately paused and released it, a thread of grievance or passion has just gone into storage – and will arise later. Threads don’t drop by themselves when the mind that is holding them moves into the background.

But the possibility that the pause offers is to place a topic under an open timeless light; having reviewed it, its basis can be seen and relinquished. And at other times, having let an idea rest in that aware space, new angles and insights into it arise as the mind re-engages.

Ajahn Sucitto

Always objecting

Time and again, in practice, all we really have to do is see the part of us that is either fearful or reluctant or objecting.

See that part – the one we think is the problem.

Once we can see that part, the one that we ourselves are objecting to, and believe to be problematic, and the origin of our difficulty in practice – once we see it, we can learn to simply be with it.

No need to do anything about it. Be with it.

Henry Shukman

Just like this

We experience a lot of moods and external stimuli during any one day. Rather than getting sucked in, can we dwell calmly, simply aware as they rise and pass away?

The mind and the externals are just thus.

The gate of liberation is open.

Dogen

Sunday Quote: within

Look within.

Within is the wellspring of good;

and it is always ready to bubble up, if you just dig.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

in mud, the lotus blooms

There is a hard truth to be told:

before Spring becomes beautiful

it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck…

But in that muddy mess,

the conditions for rebirth are being created

Parker Palmer

Effort and non-effort

Ryokan realises that happiness is related to not forcing life, but letting it unfold. The buds in Spring come all by themselves.

Once in a while I just let time move on

Leaning against a solitary pine

Standing without speaking, as does the whole Universe

Ah, who can share this solitude with me?

Ryokan, 1758 – 1831, Soto Zen Buddhist monk