What you love

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It is very important that you only do what you love to do.

You may be poor, you may go hungry, you may lose your car, you may have to move into a shabby place to live, but you will totally live.

And at the end of your days you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do.

Otherwise, you will do things only for a reason, to please other people, and you will never have lived.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Sunday quote: Like the sun

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If you want to be as clear and refreshing as
the breath of the morning breeze,
be like the sun – have nothing but warmth and light
for everyone.

Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir, 967 – 1049, Persian Sufi poet

photo fitri agung

 

Not judging our emotions

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Times of travel or transition can give rise to a lot of emotions and they always like to give birth to thoughts about how we are doing or where we are headed in life. It is best to just hold emotions as mental events that pass through and not believe the stories that arise out of them:

Trust in the simple act of attention. Awareness includes emotions as mental objects, rather than as subjects. If you don’t know this, you tend to identify with your emotions and your emotions become yourself. You become this emotional thing that has become terribly upset because the world is not respecting you enough. Our refuge is in the deathless reality rather than the transient and unstable conditions. If you trust in awareness, then the self and the emotions about oneself, whatever they might be, can be seen in terms of what they are — not judged, not made into a problem, but just noticed: “It’s like this.”

Ajahn Sumedho, The Problem with Personality

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Rising above worries

 

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Everyone is overridden by thoughts;
that’s why they have so much heartache and sorrow.
At times I give myself up to thought purposefully;


But when I choose, I spring up from those under its sway.

I am like a high-flying bird, and thought is a gnat:
How should a gnat overpower me?

Rumi

photo andrew bowden

 

Imagine

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Imagine if all the tumult of the body were to quiet down, along with our busy thoughts. 

If the very world should stop, and the mind cease thinking about itself, go beyond itself, and be quite still

Imagine if all things that are perishable grew still. 

 And imagine if that moment were to go on and on, leaving behind all other sights and sounds 

but this one vision which ravishes and absorbs and fixes the beholder in joy, 

so that the rest of eternal life were like that moment of illumination which leaves us breathless. 

St Augustine, Confessions

 

I don’t mind

peach blossom river
J. Krishnamurti, the great Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher, spoke and travelled almost continually all over the world for more than fifty years attempting to convey through words…that which is beyond words. At one of his talks in the later part of his life, he surprised his audience by asking, “Do you want to know my secret?”

Everyone became very alert. Many people in the audience had been coming to listen to him for twenty or thirty years and still failed to grasp the essence of his teaching. Finally, after all these years, the master would give them the key to understanding.

“This is my secret,” he said.   “I don’t mind what happens.”

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth – Awakening to your Life’s Purpose’