Sunday Quote: Simply yourself

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When you are content to be simply yourself

and don’t compare or compete,

everyone will respect you.

Lao Tzu

photo sander van der Wel

The greatest gift

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When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence.

How can you love if you are not there?

Thich Nhat Hanh

photo nha le hoan

This modern world

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The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock

photo ananta bhadra lamichhane

Competely in the moment

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If you can pour a cup of tea right,

you can do anything

Gurdjieff

photo saitowitz

What seems solid

hook head

It is in running away from our “monsters” that we make them seem so solid. Whatever we resist exerts a strong hold on us: in solidifying it, we empower it to stay in our mind and our life. But when we cultivate the willingness to be with life just as it is, our relationship to what we’ve avoided starts to change. Once we see through the solidity of our resistance, our lives become more fluid and workable. We’re able to move beyond where we were once stuck. Even if we don’t like our life as it is, we don’t need to wage war against it. We can start meeting our resistance squarely by noticing all of the ways in which we avoid the present moment, the ways in which we avoid practice, the ways in which we resist what is. Understanding the depth of our resistance is of major importance in furthering our practice.

Ezra Bayda, Breaking Through

Creating a gap

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It isn’t the things that happen to us that cause us to suffer;

it’s how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.

Pema Chödrön

photo of a robin sheltering from the wind and the rain by phil sangwell