Category: Be fully present

The light

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The “light” is the capacity to reconcile your experience, your sorrow, with every day that dawns. It is that understanding, which is beyond significance, that allows you to live a life and embrace the disasters and sorrows and joys that are our common lot.

But it’s only with the recognition that there is a crack in everything. I think all other visions are doomed to irretrievable gloom. And whenever anyone asks us to accept a perfect solution, that should immediately alert us to the flaws in that presentation.

Leonard Cohen, in a commentary on his song Anthem

Being peaceful at work

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Do your work,

then step back

– the only path to peacefulness.

Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Happy

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Yesterday, Irish people wished everyone a “Happy Saint Patrick’s Day” or if in the Irish language, “the blessings of Saint Patrick’s Day”. But what do these related terms “Happy” and “Blessed” mean?

By happiness I mean a deep sense of flourishing which comes from an exceptionally heathy mind

This is not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion or a mood, but an optimal state of being

Happiness is also a way of interpreting the world, since while it may be difficult to change the world, it is always possible to change the way we look at it.

Matthieu Ricard, Happiness

Sunday Quote: the holy tree

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Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there

W.B. Yeats, Irish Poet, The Two Trees

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day

True wealth

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For in the true nature of things,

if we rightly consider,

every green tree is far more glorious

than if it were made of silver or gold

Martin Luther King

The present moment

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If you view everything as practice,

your suffering will disappear.

Shido Bunan, 1603-1676, Zen Master