Stress is caused by being “here”
but wanting to be “there”.
It is a split that tears you apart inside
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
How will we be changed
The question is not, never, ever, whether or not we will be given challenges and limitations. We will. The question is, how will we hold them, how will we be changed, how will they shape us, what will we bring to the healing of them, what, if anything will be born in its place.
Wayne Muller, A Life of Being, Having and Doing Enough
Happiness hidden in plain sight.
For most of us, leaving things alone turns out to be hard work! Without the hard work we don’t seem to be able to leave our life alone and just live. Faced with the dilemma of suffering we turn our life inside out, contorting our “ordinary mind” into an “isolated mind” that seeks to distance, control and dissociate an inner “me” from outer pain. ..Whether our project is the flight from pain or the pursuit of happiness, the outcome is the same: a life in flight from itself and from this moment. And this moment turns out to bethe only answer there is, the only self there is, the only teacher, and the only reality. All hidden in plain sight.
Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind
Where the real journey starts
It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Wendall Berry, The Real Work
The salt and the water
Imagine taking a very small glass of water and putting into it a teaspoon of salt. Because of the small size of the container, the teaspoon of salt is going to have a big impact upon the water. However, if you approach a much larger body of water, such as a lake, and put into it that same teaspoonful of salt, it will not have the same intensity of impact, because of the vastness and openness of the vessel receiving it. Even when the salt remains the same, the spaciousness of the vessel receiving it changes everything. We spend a lot of our lives looking for a feeling of safety or protection; we try to alter the amount of salt that comes our way. Ironically, the salt is the very thing that we cannot do anything about, as life changes and offers us repeated ups and downs. Our true work is to create a container so immense that any amount of salt, even a truckload, can come into it without affecting our capacity to receive it. No situation, even an extreme one, then can mandate a particular reaction.
Sharon Salzberg, LovingKindness
Keeping broader horizons in mind
The part of the mind that creates products is not the part of the mind that can grant us any lasting sense of happiness. The narrow often unconscious definition of humanity as primarily a producer and creator of products is fundamentally misconceived. All good art forms remind us of the broader horizons of existence that make sense of any of its particular artifacts …..The contemplative disciplines … are simply ways of learning to pay a profound attention to these outer patterns through disciplining the breath and the body at the same time. Eventually we learn not to choose between the inner and the outer world but live at a powerful frontier between these inner and outer correspondences.
David Whyte
