If you want to know God,
become love. If you want
to know others, become love.
If you want to know yourself,
become love. And if you want
to know love, forget all you
thought you knew or needed
to know, and become love.
Meister Eckhart, 1260 – c. 1328, German theologian, philosopher and mystic
The first technique I’d like to share – dropping – works to break the habit of being caught up in our thinking minds, lost in thought, and out of touch with our bodies. Dropping is not so much a mediation as a way to cut through the tension-building stream of constant thinking, worrying and speediness. It allows us to land in the present moment, in a grounded and embodied way.
In dropping you do three things at the same time: 1. Raise your arms and let your hands drop onto your thighs. 2 Exhale a loud, big breath. 3. Drop your awareness from thinking into what your body feels.
Just rest there being aware of your body without any special agenda. Feel your body with all its sensations, pleasant or unpleasant, warmth or coolness, pressure, tingling, pain, bliss, whatever comes into your awareness.
So in brief, drop, rest, and relax…let yourself relax from within. Give yourself permission to do nothing.
from the very nice book by Daniel Goleman and Tsonknyi Rinpoche, Why we Meditate: 7 Simple Practices for a Calmer Mind
Life is like music for its own sake.
We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.
Alan Watts
An aikido instructor once described to me a test he took for promotion to the next level. Unbeknownst to him at the time, one-third of the test was determined by how he entered the hall and sat down before his name was even called. What the masters were looking for was whether the student was already in a continuous flow entering the hall, or whether he regarded the test as a separate point at which to turn on and impress the teachers.
Philip Toshio Sudo, Zen 24/7
What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.
To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There is simply no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
Marge Piercy, 1936 -, American activist, poet and writer, The Seven Of Pentacles
