Always needing something

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What we sense as self is always changing and unsatisfactory. The sense of self always has to have something or do something. It wants to be approved of by somebody, or be busy winning at something, or be analysing itself or trying to wipe itself out. It is always orbiting around some need or another. There’s the need to know something, or have an opinion; or the need to feel one’s doing good enough; the need to feel that one is useful; the need to feel that other people like me. The need to be the same as everyone else. Or the need to be different from everyone else. Or, different on some days, the same on other days. And the need to be able to change from being same to being different when I need to. And so on – it never really settles.

Ajahn Sucitto, Good Enough

photo ketterechts

Kindness with ourselves today

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In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life.  That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy…  all these are undoubtedly great virtues…  But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea, the very fiend himself – that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved – what then?

Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, Chapter V, “Psychotherapy or the Clergy,” 519-520

photo ras67

Whatever comes up

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Patience is the ability to watch something until it changes.

Ajahn Sucitto

photo Benson kua

Our Practice for today. Simple, but not easy.

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Whatever happens. Whatever

what is is is what

I want. Only that. But that.

Galway Kinnell, Prayer

photo thomas brown

A contented mind

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Great wealth consists in living on a little with a contented mind;

for of a little there is never a lack.

Lucretius, Roman poet c 99 BC – 55 BC,  On the Nature of Things Book 5,  1118-1120

photo Suriya Donavanik

Ideas of perfection

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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