Everyone should sit firmly anchored in the place
where there is no better and worse.
Kodo Sawaki, 1880 – 1965, Japanese Sōtō Zen teacher
Category: Be fully present
The limitations of our labels
The Real …expects nothing of speech
Le réel …n’attend rien de la parole.
Jacques Lacan, French Psychoanalyst, Ecrits
Believing our story
Part of waking up is becoming sensitive to how we become discouraged, how we close down, and where we go for false comfort. To wake up is to become aware of the tendency to judge ourselves, to take our failures personally, to fall into despair, self-pity, depression, frustration, anger, or wherever we tend to go when we believe the story that we are a person who can’t do it right. Seeing all of this is enough. Awareness is its own action. We don’t need to analyze it or impose changes based on our ideas of what should be happening. Just being awake to the present moment, as it is, and seeing clearly what is happening: this is transformative. We are simply awake here and now.
Joan Tollifson, Nothing to Grasp
Giving over power
Suffering begins when you mentally label a situation as bad.
That causes an emotional contraction.
When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is available to you.
The contraction cuts you off from that power, the power of life itself
Eckhart Tolle
Noticing beauty
Sometimes I can take things or people for granted and everything becomes part of the “normal everydayness.” At times like this I can drift from one moment to another, doing the best to fit into this place called life. And because of this I can get lost and lose heart. We all can lose each other. It can take reminders to make us step back and realize what a blessing it is to be immersed in a life that is just full of meaning. As de Chardin said “Nothing here is profane for those who know how to see”.
Beauty surrounds us,
but usually we need to be walking
in a garden to know it.
Rumi, Story Water
Speech and silence
I’ve been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech – if not all human speech – is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder – they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we’re breathing in. The problem is, that when we’re breathing in, we can’t speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.
Li-Young Lee
photo epSos.de
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