Can we stop judging our whole life just because of a disturbing feeling in the body?
All of our reactions to people, to situations, to thoughts in our mind
– are actually reactions to the kind of sensations that are arising in our body.
Tara Brach
It’s another Monday
The mind is constantly making judgments about ourselves, others, or how this day is going to be. Better to stick with the moment-to-moment experience, and avoid coming to conclusions before they happen.
Our daily world is commonly held in terms of non-specific generalizations, like its ‘another Monday,’ or, ‘a typical man’, or ,‘I dread meeting Janice, she’s always like this,’ or ‘I’m hopeless.’ In fact ……. any sense of a lasting entity or state of being is an act of generalization. It’s a useful convention, but one that allows the mind’s neuroses and corruptions to be projected onto the here and now.
Ajahn Sucitto, The Low Point
Sunday Quote: A deep yearning
Advent starts today, the period of looking forward to Christmas, but more deeply, it is a good season to look at desire and longing. There is a type of hole at the heart of human subjectivity, which gives rise to a perpetual cause of desire. In traditions, both East and West, it is understood that this desire, this restlessness or emptiness, will never go away. Indeed, it the this emptiness which gives rise to a longing that takes us beyond ourselves. Advertisers try to lure us into the belief that we can make this longing go away, encouraging us to think that once we we get this thing or feeling we will be at rest.
Dear soul, if you were not friends
with the vast nothing inside,
why would you always be casting your net
into it, and waiting so patiently?
Rumi
A new year
The last day of the year in the Christian liturgical calendar. Advent and the preparation for Christmas starts tomorrow:
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
Mary Oliver, Starlings in Winter
The paradox of human life
The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings.
If we refuse to hold them in hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.
Parker Palmer
In your deepest self
If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live,
or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair,
but ask me what I am living for, in detail,
ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.
Thomas Merton, My argument with the Gestapo
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