What seems solid

hook head

It is in running away from our “monsters” that we make them seem so solid. Whatever we resist exerts a strong hold on us: in solidifying it, we empower it to stay in our mind and our life. But when we cultivate the willingness to be with life just as it is, our relationship to what we’ve avoided starts to change. Once we see through the solidity of our resistance, our lives become more fluid and workable. We’re able to move beyond where we were once stuck. Even if we don’t like our life as it is, we don’t need to wage war against it. We can start meeting our resistance squarely by noticing all of the ways in which we avoid the present moment, the ways in which we avoid practice, the ways in which we resist what is. Understanding the depth of our resistance is of major importance in furthering our practice.

Ezra Bayda, Breaking Through

Creating a gap

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It isn’t the things that happen to us that cause us to suffer;

it’s how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.

Pema Chödrön

photo of a robin sheltering from the wind and the rain by phil sangwell

Sunday Quote: Spontaneity

wild flowers 33

We need the tonic of wildness

Thoreau

Always needing something

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What we sense as self is always changing and unsatisfactory. The sense of self always has to have something or do something. It wants to be approved of by somebody, or be busy winning at something, or be analysing itself or trying to wipe itself out. It is always orbiting around some need or another. There’s the need to know something, or have an opinion; or the need to feel one’s doing good enough; the need to feel that one is useful; the need to feel that other people like me. The need to be the same as everyone else. Or the need to be different from everyone else. Or, different on some days, the same on other days. And the need to be able to change from being same to being different when I need to. And so on – it never really settles.

Ajahn Sucitto, Good Enough

photo ketterechts

Not always straight

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It may be that

when we no longer know

what to do,

we have come

to our real work,

and when we

no longer know

which way to go,

we have begun

our real journey

Wendell Berry, The Real Work

photo Anna16

What gives us energy

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The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon.

We are never tired,

so long as we can see far enough.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

photo from the top of Skellig Michael by mike shields