This exercise is called the four smiles exercise.
Basically all you do is take a moment, let your mouth soften into a smile, then expand that smile for each of the next three breaths. First, expanding it so you feel your whole mouth, not just your lips, but your whole inner mouth soften and rise into a smile. Your forehead, your throat, and you keep feeling that smile expand until you feel it in your heart. That literally takes four breaths and you’re feeling a lot more buoyant.
Tzivia Gover
Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof. Matthew 6:34
Abba Poemen said about Abba Pior that every single day he made a fresh beginning.
Abba Poemen Egyptian monk (c. 340–450)
Hold tight to what is most yourself, Don’t squander it
Don’t let your life be governed by what disturbs you.
Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri , c. 973-1058, Arab philosopher, poet, and writer.
A long weekend in Ireland. Time to switch off and nourish our deeper selves:
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.…
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly.
Live a three-dimensional life;
stay away from screens.
Wendell Berry, How to Be a poet
It is hard to find better guidance than this. Knowing it deep down would be so nice: to be without anxiety about my imperfections or messy reality or about what is not fully achieved in my life:
One thing, all things, they move and intermingle without distinction.
To live in this realization
is to be without anxiety about imperfection.
The mind of absolute trust is beyond all thought, all striving,
is perfectly at peace, for in it there is no yesterday, no today, no tomorrow.
Seng T’san, 7th Century Zen Patriarch, Hsin Hsin Ming
Not only is life always in movement, but the mind is also.
So, in meditation as in life, how to deal with negative thoughts and difficult feeling states…
In zazen [meditation], leave your front door and your back door open.
Let thoughts come and go.
Just don’t serve them tea.
Shunryu Suzuki
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