You live,
not by securing yourself against impermanence,
but by finding yourself as impermanence
Michael Stone, Awake in the World
Our cat Barney who died on Tuesday, aged 19
Category: Be fully present
Saturday: Finding ourselves again
One of the nice things about a Saturday after an intense week is that we can come back to ourselves, and find within us a centre that is always there, even when we lose sight of it:
I lost my way, I forgot to call on your name. The raw heart beat against the world, and the tears were for my lost victory. But you are here. You have always been here. The world is all forgetting, and the heart is a rage of directions, but your name unifies the heart, and the world is lifted into its place.
Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller’s heart for his turning
Leonard Cohen, Poem#50 from The Book of Mercy
Today…Just let it be
An inner voice asked, ‘What would happen if, in this moment, I didn’t try to do anything, to make anything different?’ I immediately felt the visceral grip of fear and then a familiar sinking hole of shame – the very feelings I had been trying to avoid for as long as I could remember.
But then the same inner voice whispered very quietly, familiar refrain, ‘Just let it be.
Tara Brach
photo alex proimos
Stop forcing life…. observe and let it emerge
A nice simple description of what meditation is, but also what the correct position towards life is:
It’s more for me as with going into a forest:
if you sit quietly for a long time,
the life around you emerges.
Jame Hirshfield
Need to get somewhere, be someone
The psychological self is rooted in time. It needs to feel it is on a journey, that it is getting somewhere — anywhere. The journey is what provides it with a feeling of existence and continuity. If it weren’t going somewhere it would be forced to feel the fear of the present moment, the fear of not existing, of the void beneath its feet. Our individual journey is reinforced by the cultural norm. Our culture is so fixated on the necessity of doing that if we are idle for a while we are very likely to think we are wasting our time and our lives. Everyone wants to “have a life” and “get a life,” and that usually means throwing ourselves into some gainful activity that will show a tangible result.
Roger Housden, Dropping the Struggle
photo: payton chung
The danger of compulsive working
Western laziness ……consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy. We are so addicted to looking outside ourselves that we have lost access to our inner being almost completely. We are terrified to look inward, because our culture has given us no idea of what we will find. So we make our lives so hectic that we eliminate the slightest risk of looking into ourselves. … in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do.
Sogyal Rinpoche
photo: wusirichard
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