When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves – from other people, relationships, or material goods – or from our own self-development, we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion. But according to Buddhism, such a strategy is doomed. Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.
Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart
photo wingchi poon
Our effort in meditation is to get rid of something extra.
Shunryu Suzuki
photo cannedcat
How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you. There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don’t live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.
Eckhart Tolle, A new Earth: Awakening to your Life’s Purpose
photo tony hisgett
Tibetan monks frequently practice a moment of mindfulness each and every time they walk through a door. Sometimes they do this by remembering to recite a certain verse or mantra as they do so. Try this yourself for a day. Every time you walk through a door, pause, take a moment, breathe in and out. Bring yourself back to the moment. Then cross the threshold and walk on.
Lama Surya Das, Awakening to the Sacred: Creating a Spiritual Life from Scratch
photo joanbanjo
In the Buddhist tradition the ability to be happy is often translated into English as ‘equanimity,’
roughly meaning to be equal to things,
to be large enough for the drama in which we find ourselves.
David Whyte, The Three Marriages
photo oxyman
Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self.
When we don’t hold strongly to the self as self, what do we have to fear?
Have faith in the way things are.
Love all things that happen as your self; then you can care for all things.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
photo : julio nohara
