Oops! The Moment!
Once you miss it, it is gone forever.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, French Photographer
Category: Be fully present
Keeping things in perspective
The mind seems to prefer drama, and a lot of the movies we play in our minds have us at the center of the story, exaggerating the impact of potential future scenarios, as we silently rehearse our lines to ourselves. This is also true in how we relate to the external world.
Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? Are we not especially significant because our century is? There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times.
Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening…
Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy – probably a necessary lie – that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods!
But can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?
Annie Dillard, For the Time Being
We make our own problems
When you are completely absorbed in your breathing there is no self. What is your breathing? That breathing is not you, nor air. What is it? It is not self at all. When there is no self you have absolute freedom. Because you have a silly idea of self you have a lot of problems. So I say your problems are homemade.
Suzuki Roshi, teaching June 1st, 1966
Welcome what is
As long as the mind is in conflict – blaming, resisting, condemning – there can be no understanding.
If I want to understand you, I must not condemn you, obviously.
J. Krishnamurti.
Seeing our tendency to blame
When you check your own mind properly,
you stop blaming others for your problems
Lama Thubten Yeshe, Your mind is your religion
Allow them to come, allow them to go
If we can allow some space within our awareness and rest there, we can respect our troubling thoughts and emotions, allow them to come, and let them go.
Our lives may be complicated on the outside, but we remain simple, easy, and open on the inside.
Tsoknyi Rinpoche
Mindfulbalance 