Time to take your turn

Giving up some conditioned behaviour patterns is also good:

You didn’t come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren’t born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose — paid but good. It is now your turn to reap.

I never used to take my turn. I always gave my turn away. I helped others have a great turn. I must have had a clipboard by the time I was six, because by then I had a whole caseload of people to keep track of. After they had all gotten a turn, then maybe I could go, if there was time and it didn’t bother anyone.

Now I take my turn, as a radical act.

Anne Lamott, Stitches

The mind as free and vast

More on letting go of the normal importance we give to our thoughts.

Emptiness here means a way of perceiving in which one simply notes “There is this”,  without adding the presuppositions we usually add to experience in order to make sense of it.

Go straight to the empty and free and vast, 
With no pondering what to think. 

The previous thought is already extinct, 
The following thought does not arise, 
The present thought is itself empty.

T’aego, 1301 – 1382. Korean Seon (Zen) Master

Don’t pay attention

Autumn means letting go. A good place to start is with self-critical thoughts:

Stop.

Be silent.

When thought has no customers, thought vanishes.

Nisargadatta Maharaj 1897 – 1981

Sunday Quote: The start of Autumn

Don’t prolong the past,

don’t invite the future,

don’t be deceived by appearances,

just dwell in present awareness.

Patrul Rinpoche

Never sitting still

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.

They will practice yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.

Carl Jung

Balance

It is not always easy to maintain a tranquil and balanced mind when work pressures mount, or we have a lot of evaluation reports to complete. Resting in awareness  by stepping out of the story line is a good thing to do, even for a few moments every hour.

Anyone can restore some degree of balance

between thinking and awareness

right in this present moment,

which is the only moment that any of us ever has anyway.

Jon Kabat Zinn