Sit quietly, and listen for a voice that will say, ‘Be more silent.’
Your old life was a frantic running from silence.
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Dwell in silence. Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.
Rumi
Category: Be fully present
The key to contentment
One who is content with what he has and who accepts the fact that he inevitably misses very much in life is far better off than the one who has much more but who worries about all he might be missing. For we can not make the best of what we are if our hearts are always divided between what we are and what we are not. We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony. Let us therefore learn to pass from one imperfect activity to another without worrying too much about what we are missing.
Thomas Merton.
Sunday quote: Peace of Mind
I know but one freedom
and that is the freedom of the mind
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Light is within
I wish I could show you,
when you are lonely or in darkness
the astonishing light of your own being.
Hafiz
Light entering the burial chamber of Newgrange in Ireland at dawn on the Winter Solstice
Everything changes
A quote from the new book by Joseph Goldstein, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, which is a profound reflection on the Satipatthana Sutta, one of the foundational texts in mindfulness meditation. Here he suggests a practice to help us get a real understanding of impermanence, to see directly the truth of change and in that way gain a helpful perspective on how to deal with the ups and downs of a day:
When we pay attention, we see that everything is disappearing and new things are arising, not only every day or hour but in every moment. When we leave our house, or simply walk from one room to another, can we notice this flow of changing experience – the flow of visual forms as we move, different sounds, changing sensations in the body, fleeting thoughts or images? What happens to each of these experiences? Do they last? The truth of their changing nature is so ordinary that we have mostly stopped noticing it at all.
photo mx
Turning up
Our appointment with life is in the present moment.
The place of our appointment is right here, in this very place.
Thich Nhat Hanh
