Running and missing

runningFrequently for us time is money. We must save as much time as possible, so that we have free time for more important things. The question is – what is more important to us? Often we cannot do much at all with all the time “saved”. We are habitually in a rush. But where to? We’ve become victims of our own frenzy – we rush at all times including our free time. He too we want to do more ever faster. But this constant rushing takes away our ability to feel and to experience the things we do. Increasingly we only feel alive in the midst of the hustles and bustles. We no longer feel ourselves, our breathing, our body, or the stirring of our heart. As the poet Ingeborg Bachman once said: “Idleness is the beginning of all love”

Anselm Gruen, Angels Calling

Today is where we live

P1000460
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Philip Larkin

Meet the wind

wind tree

The way to dissolve our resistance to life is to meet it face to face. When we feel resentment because the room is too hot, we could meet the heat and feel its fieriness and its heaviness. When we feel resentment because the room is too cold, we could meet the cold and feel its iciness and its bite. When we want to complain about the rain we could feel its wetness instead. When we worry because the wind is shaking our windows, we could meet the wind and hear its sound. Cutting our expectations for a cure is a gift we can give ourselves. There is no cure for hot and cold. They will go on forever.

Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

A solid place

File:Mount Asgard 3 2001-07-25.jpg

When you think about yourself and who you are, who you should be, who you would like to be, who you do not want to be – how good or bad, wonderful or horrible you are, all this whirls around, it goes all over the place. One moment you can feel ” I am a really wonderful person”, the next moment you can feel ” I am an absolutely hopeless, horrible person”. But if you take refuge in awareness, then whatever you are thinking does not make much difference, because your refuge is in this ability of awareness, rather than in the gyrations and fluctuations of the self-view.

Ajahn Sumedho, Intuitive Awareness

Photo: Ansgar Walk

Kindness towards oneself

File:Flickr - The U.S. Army - Soldier returns to Haiti, helps family.jpg

Instead of mercilessly judging and criticizing yourself for various inadequacies or shortcomings, self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with personal failings – after all, who ever said you were supposed to be perfect? You may try to change in ways that allow you to be more healthy and happy, but this is done because you care about yourself, not because you are worthless or unacceptable as you are. Perhaps most importantly, having compassion for yourself means that you honor and accept your humanness.  Things will not always go the way you want them to.  You will encounter frustrations, losses will occur, you will make mistakes, bump up against your limitations, fall short of your ideals.  This is the human condition, a reality shared by all of us. The more you open your heart to this reality instead of constantly fighting against it, the more you will be able to feel compassion for yourself and all your fellow humans in the experience of life.

 Kristin Neff

Being comfortable with non-doing

The emptiness of the desert makes it possible to learn the almost impossible:

the joyful acceptance of our uselessness. 

Ivan Illich