The mind that tries to shape tomorrow beyond its capacities
will find no rest.
Rumi, That lives in Us
Category: Be fully present
Sunday Quote: Miracles
A miracle is often the willingness to see the common
in an uncommon way.
Noah benShea
As a friend
Here is a practice I have been working with for more than a decade. I recite, usually silently, these two sentences:
May I meet this moment fully.
May I meet it as a friend.
These blessing phrases cultivate and sustain a mind of peace and goodwill. For me, they represent the promise of practice. “May I meet this moment fully” expresses my faith that an alert and balanced mind is a possibility for human beings. “May I meet it as a friend” reminds me that my mind’s natural benevolence is my best refuge. Although most of my daily practice has always been the simple practice of alert attention to changing experience, I often begin periods of simple sitting with some repetitions of this two-phrase mantra as a kind of mood-setter, an incliner of my mind toward relaxing.
Sylvia Boorstein, A Bad Day at the Airport
An invitation to fullness
There is really no place to go in this moment. We are already here. Can we be here fully?
There really is nothing to do. Can we let go into non-doing, into pure being? There really is nothing to attain, no special “state” or “feeling” because whatever you are experiencing in this moment is already special, already extraordinary, by virtue of the fact that it is being experienced.
The paradox of this invitation is that everything you might wish for is already here.
And the only important thing is – to be the knowing that awareness already is.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners
Welcome to this world
Another reflection on the calming effects of nature.
This famous haiku reflects on the letting go found under a tree when all things feel at home and we know that beauty is being born at every second. At times like this we treat all moments and all people as friends
In the cherry blossom’s shade
there’s no such thing
as a stranger
Kobayashi Issa, 1763 – 1828
A doorway into thanks
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
Mary Oliver, Praying
photo tango paso
