There is an Indian proverb that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual .
Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time
but unless we go into every room every day,
even if only to keep it aired,
we are not a complete person
Rumer Godden, 1907 – 1998, author, A House with Four Rooms
photo takkk
You should not take personally things that actually aren’t personal.
It turns out when you start to really dig down underneath it, there’s very little that’s personal.
Taking things personally is a prescription for infinite suffering.
Jon Kabat Zinn
photo of cows disturbing a walk along the beach at Whitepark Bay, Ireland, by gtapp
In meditation practice we are cultivating a mind that knows rather than judges. In other words, it has enough space to hold what is happening, without it triggering reactions or negative stories about how our lives are. I find the image in this passage to be a help toward developing that:
As a bee gathering nectar
does not harm or disturb
the colour and fragrance of the flower;
so does a wise person move
through the world.
The Dhammapada, v 49
photo Andrea Westmoreland
The more we connect with a bigger perspective,
the more we connect with energetic joy.
Pema Chödrön
Sun rising over Alps at dawn
The weekend can allow us get out into nature and into its pace, learning its balance and wisdom. It is a useful corrective to the speed which modern society – and workplaces – consider necessary, and to the importance which it places on passing trends:
The internal activity of analysis, speculation, memory, investigation, cross-referencing, decision-making, and self-evaluation can amount to a volume of overwhelming proportions. Then the experience of overload develops into one of exhaustion, or of a pressure in our lives that diminishes peace and joy… This is the loss of balance that we can rightly experience as being flooded.
It isn’t the world per se, nor is it that we are chronically unbalanced;
it’s just that the right relationship hasn’t been struck.
Ajahn Sucitto, Parami
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure
with a liberal allowance of time.
Henry David Thoreau
photo of the Mourne mountains, County Down by ardfern
Life is a living of who we are, until that form of self can no longer hold us, and …we must break the forms that contain us in order to birth our way into the next self. This is how we shed our many ways of seeing the world, not that any are false, but that each serves its purpose for a time until we grow and they no longer serve us.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
photo lionel allorge
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