Category: Be fully present

Nowhere to go

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feet_sea
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

Fears leave

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File:Circles on the Water of Startops Reservoir - geograph.org.uk - 1405622.jpg

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Wendell Berry

photo chris reynolds

Wanting different weather

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Even though the hawthorn trees are in full bloom here and the old proverb, – “ne’r cast a clout til May be out” – tells us that it is time to switch to summer clothing, one cannot do so yet. Frequent heavy showers are followed by calm and sunshine, which is good for growth in the fields and the garden, but not so good for being able to get out for a walk in them. A lot of mental energy is wasted in wishing that external circumstances were different and “suited” us better.

A monk said to Master Tozan, ” Cold and heat descend upon us. how can we avoid them?” Tozan said, “Why don’t you go where there is no cold or heat” The monk said, ” Where is the place where there is no cold or heat?” Tozan said, “When cold, let it be so cold that it kills you; when hot, let it be so hot that it kills you.”

In this teaching “kill you” means kill your ideas about how things have to be for you to be happy. It may sound odd but you can be practicing mindfulness with discomfort and pain and be quite happy. The happiness comes from the pleasure of just being present, and also from the confidence that you are gaining – a confidence that, with ongoing practice, you will be able to face whatever life brings you, even pain, aided by tools such as mindfulness.

Jan Chozen Bays, How to Train a Wild Elelhant.

Sunday Quote: We pass this way once

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azur-bleu

If I were to begin life again, I should want it as it was.

I would only open my eyes a little more

Jules Renard, 1864 – 1910, French author

Being awake

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Bumblebee

There’s not a good way to come into meditation or a bad way to come into meditation. It might feel preferable to show up feeling calm and spacious, but really meditation is about being awake and present to whatever is going on. You can’t critique your meditation in terms of good and bad. The only thing you can measure your meditation against is the question: “Was I present or not?” And even then, to say to yourself that you weren’t present is a result of the fact that you’ve been meditating and you recognized that fact. There’s some sense of awareness about what is actually happening.

Pema Chodron, How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with your mind

Losing touch with the real

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blossom falling

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts,

so he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusion.


Alan Watts