My experience is what I agree to attend to,
Only those items I notice shape my mind.
William James, American psychologist and philosopher.
Category: Be fully present
Seeing that things arise and pass away
Let not a person revive the past
Or on the future build his hopes
For the past has been left behind
and the future has not been reached.
Instead with insight let him see
Each presently arisen state,
Let him know that and be sure of it,
Invincibly and unshakeably.
Today the effort must be made;
Tomorrow Death may come, who knows?
No bargain with Mortality
Can keep him and his hordes away
But one who dwells thus ardently,
Relentlessly, by day and night –
It is he, the Peaceful Sage has said,
Who has had a single excellent night.
The Buddha
Every moment is a new opportunity
In Zen, we have a saying that if you haven’t seen somebody for two minutes, don’t assume he or she is the same person. Maybe that person has changed, or maybe conditions have changed. The important thing is to see what I can do now. If you and I are not bound by our past conditioning, we can see things afresh. Then every moment contains a new opportunity.
Bernie Glassman, Instructions to the Cook
Sunday Quote: Awareness
In a crumb of bread the whole mystery is.
Paddy Kavanagh, Irish Poet, The Great Hunger
The address of life
“I have arrived” is our practice. When we breathe in, we take refuge in our in-breath, and we say “I have arrived”. When we make a step, we take refuge in our step, and we say “I have arrived”. This is not a statement to yourself or to another person. “I have arrived” means I have stopped running, I have arrived in the present moment, because only the present moment contains life.
Stopping running is a very important practice . We have been running all our life: we believe that peace happiness and success are present in some other place and time. We don’t know that everything – peace happiness and stability – should be looked for in the here and now. This is the address of life – the intersection of here and now.
Thich Nhat Hahn, Happiness
Welcome to being you
You will have many ideas about what meditation is supposed to be and your experience in meditation will not match your ideas. You will believe that the important point is to get your experience to match your ideas of what your experience should be like. When you are unable to do this you will say that meditation is difficult. You will be ready to give up. But when you can just sit, having the experience you are having, whatever it is, without comparing it to what it should be, you will have true ease. No longer busy with chasing after some imagined perfection, you rest in the moment. You “own” your body and your mind….This is called “No more worry about not being perfect”. Welcome to being you.
Edward Espe Brown, Zazen: The Practice of Freedom
