Treat every moment as your last.
It is not a preparation for something else.
Shunryu Suzuki-roshi
Category: Be fully present
Not noticing
Our attitude is frequently one of wanting to get it done, wanting to have it finished in order to be peaceful, to relax, or to enjoy ourselves….
We want to be a feeling.
Rushing along to be something in the next moment,
we fail to open and appreciate this moment
Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the wheel of Truth
photo US fish and wildlife services
Aware of patterns
We all have well-established habits of thought, emotion, reaction and judgement,
and without the keen awareness of practice, we’re just acting out these patterns.
When they arise, we’re not aware they’ve arisen.
We get lost in them, identify with them, act on them
— so much of our life is just acting out patterns.
Joseph Goldstein
A way of working with stress
Can you accept the moments of anger and fear as guests,
be willing to receive them with kindness
without feeling obliged to serve them a five-course meal?
Christina Feldman
Getting lost in the thinking mind
That sand into which we bury ourselves in order not to see, is formed of words…and it is true that words, their labyrinths, the exhausting immensity of their “possibles”, in short their treachery, have something of quicksand about them
Georges Bataille, French intellectual, 1897 – 1962 L’expérience intérieure (Inner Experience)
With thanks to Laura Rai, dedicated Researcher in the Psychology Department at Maynooth, for sending me this quote
Nowhere to go
Where is there a place for you to be? No place.
Nothing outside you can give you any place.
In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
You needn’t look at the sky because
it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it.
You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards
into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them.
In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
If there was any Fall, look there,
if there was any Redemption, look there,
and if you expect any Judgment, look there,
because they all three will have to be in your time
and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?
Flannery O Connor, Wise Blood
