No Appointment
No Disappointment
Swami Satchidananda, Indian religious teacher, 1914 – 2002
photo Cbaile19
Category: Be fully present
Why each moment this day is precious
Dew evaporates
And all our world is dew…so dear,
So fresh, so fleeting.
Issa, 1763 – 1828, On the death of his child
Beneath
Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior.
You are beneath the thinker.
You are the stillness beneath the mental noise.
You are the love and joy beneath the pain.
Eckhart Tolle
photo freddy2001
Contentment: Letting it land
One or two practices from different traditions on letting go after work, or at the end of a day or a week, or maybe endings in general. They remind us of the wider perspective mentioned at the start of the week. It is linked to a sense of release, the opposite to the continual striving and adding on which we think will bring contentment.
[When] you get to the end of the meeting, the day, let that unravel. You cultivate the wisdom of no-performance and no-result. You listen to any judgements that are rattling in your mind, establish mindfulness on the mind-state and its feeling, then let the defenses and identities go. It’s a matter of acknowledging the inner helicopter that is hovering over ‘If only this’ and ‘I should have said that’ and ‘How dare they do this!’ and steadily touching the ground. Allow the feeling to be felt and breathe through it. Let it end, even let the wish that it all end come to an end. When the rotor blades stop, just here, on the other side of failure, is purity and release.
Ajahn Sucitto, Happy Deathday
photo muffet
The basic truth about happiness
“All is always now,” says T. S. Eliot.
This statement implies a profound insight: Not only is the now not in time; time is in the now.
When the future comes, it will be now, and any past event becomes now as we remember it. There is only one now. It cannot be multiplied; it simply is.
The now is the opposite of time.
In fact, this is Augustine’s definition: “Eternity is the now that does not pass away.”
A happiness anchored in the now is eternal.
David Steindl-Rast, A Basic Human Approach to Happiness
photo Brian Robert Marshall
At home
Why do we always think that happiness is to be found in the future, or when this or that happens,
and not seek it in the life that we have or in the here and now?
I was passionate,
filled with longing,
I searched
far and wide.
But the day
that the Truthful One
found me,
I was at home.
Lal Ded, (Mother Lalla), 1320 – 1392, Kasmiri Hindu poet and mystic
