The mind starts to become quiet when it really sees how untrue its narrative is.
Adyashanti
Sunday Quote: Stories
A state of grace
To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease and lightness.
This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad.
Eckhart Tolle
Be patient
Patience means allowing things to unfold at their own speed
rather than jumping in with your habitual response to either pain or pleasure. The real happiness that underlies both gloriousness and wretchedness often gets short-circuited by our jumping too fast into the same habitual pattern.
Patience is not …learned when everything is harmonious and going
well. When everything is smooth sailing, who needs patience? … There is no cultivation of patience when your pattern is to just try to seek harmony and smooth everything out. Patience implies
willingness to be alive rather than trying to seek harmony.
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Commentary on the Lojong Slogan, “Whichever of the Two Occurs, Be Patient”
Slow harvest
Nothing great is created suddenly,
anymore than a bunch of grapes or a fig.
If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time.
Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen
Epicetus
Pay attention
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Mary Oliver, The Summer Day [extract]
Lifelong search
There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.
Josephine Hart, Damage
Mindfulbalance 