Category: Be fully present

In the midst of life, just wash the bowl

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Once a monk made a request of Joshu.
“I have just entered the monastery,” he said. “Please give me instructions, Master.”
Joshu said, “Have you had your breakfast?”
“Yes, I have,” replied the monk.
“Then,” said Joshu, “wash your bowls.”
The monk had an insight.

I love this koan. I am the student in the midst of my life, waiting for life to happen. How do we enter our life fully? It is right here. How do we want to live? Can we allow all the joys and sorrows to enliven us? Or do we just go along with all our patterns and habits? People who are dying always remind me: ‘I can’t believe I wasn’t here for most of my life.’ That’s one of the most common things I hear, and the biggest regrets. Many people have not inhabited their life because they’re just waiting for other moments. Are we waiting for life to happen in the midst of life? How can we give ourselves fully to our lives, moment to moment? Don’t wait. Life is always right here.

Koshin Paley Ellison, Huffington Post

We cannot stop the world

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What arises in one’s mind is not something we can control. We can change the ground, to some extent, out of which emotions tend to arise, but we can’t stop things from coming up. Every moment is conditions coming together and coming apart. How we relate to what arises in one’s mind is what’s most important.

Sharon Salzberg

We are more than what happens today

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Our awareness of our depth of being is fleeting. Yet just because we close our eyes doesn’t mean the sun has disappeared. And just because we can’t keep the unquestionable fact of being alive in view doesn’t mean that the inherent vitality of life has disappeared. We are more than what happens to us. We are more than what we think or fear. The turbulence we encounter is very real, but underneath what happens to us is the inherent, unwavering fact of life filling us from within. 

Mark Nepo, Our Authority of Being

Sunday Quote: Making room

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Letting there be room for not knowing

is the most important thing of all.

Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

Putting down the burden

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal center of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.  

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature.

Unique experiences

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To the attentive eye,
each moment of the year
has its own beauty,
and in the same field,
it beholds,
every hour,
a picture which was never seen before,
and which shall never be seen again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson