Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself
when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong.
At that point, you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those,
a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.
Pema Chodron
What is it that I want? Not money,
Not a large desk, not a house with ten rooms.
This is what I want to do: to sit here,
To take no part, to be called away by the wind…
Robert Bly, The Call Away
photo Glendalough by neutralgrey
The mind likes to generate stories about experience and turn them into a judgment as to how things are going or predictions as to what will really happen. It is useful to spot this and ask ourselves “why would you say that?”. This is the most basic practice and lets us remain with our bare attention, without making it into a big story about “us” or adding on stuff from our history or our insecurities:
Then you should train yourself thus: In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In reference to what passes through as thoughts, only what passes through as thoughts. That is how you should train yourself.
When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard, only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the thought in reference to the thought, then there is no “you” hooked in connection with that. When you are not hooked “with that”, you will not be “in that”. When there is no you “in that”, you are neither here nor beyond nor in-between the two. This is how you get to the end of suffering
The Buddha, Ud 1.10 Bahiya Sutra
Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.
Sharon Salzburg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation
Only from the heart
can you touch the sky
Rumi
photo nojavan
The five instructions given to Machig Labdron in the 12th century by her teacher Padampa Sangye
Confess your hidden faults.
Approach what you find distasteful.
Help those you do not want to help.
Anything you are attached to, let go of.
Go to the places that scare you.
Mindfulbalance 