Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time:
not always, for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
from Marge Percy, The Seven of Pentacles
Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior.
You are beneath the thinker.
You are the stillness beneath the mental noise.
You are the love and joy beneath the pain.
Eckhart Tolle
photo freddy2001
To heal
is to touch with love
that which we previously touched with fear.
Steven Levine
Every day has enough trouble of its own
When you go to sleep
bury all that has happened in the mercy of God
It will be safe there
Stand back from what has happened
and be grateful for it all
When the new day begins
be sure that you yourself can be
new and pure as new light
It is like the resurrection
Rule for a New Brother
photo izemah
One or two practices from different traditions on letting go after work, or at the end of a day or a week, or maybe endings in general. They remind us of the wider perspective mentioned at the start of the week. It is linked to a sense of release, the opposite to the continual striving and adding on which we think will bring contentment.
[When] you get to the end of the meeting, the day, let that unravel. You cultivate the wisdom of no-performance and no-result. You listen to any judgements that are rattling in your mind, establish mindfulness on the mind-state and its feeling, then let the defenses and identities go. It’s a matter of acknowledging the inner helicopter that is hovering over ‘If only this’ and ‘I should have said that’ and ‘How dare they do this!’ and steadily touching the ground. Allow the feeling to be felt and breathe through it. Let it end, even let the wish that it all end come to an end. When the rotor blades stop, just here, on the other side of failure, is purity and release.
Ajahn Sucitto, Happy Deathday
photo muffet
A rare second post on this bright and beautiful Thursday afternoon:
Those of you who have followed the blog for a while know that I do not tend to link to outside blogs and I rarely promote things although I get a lot of requests to do so, as I feel these distract from the simple daily purpose of the blog. However, the blog has been recently nominated and recommended a number of times and I just wish to link here to one of those recommendations as we are with some very fine blogs that you might find useful. The link can be found here: https://openforest.net/4-great-mindfulness-blogs/. It is always nice to hear that some people find the blog useful.
The overall site https://openforest.net/ has an introduction to mindfulness course which like similar courses online may be of interest to anyone starting out on this path.
