There is a Tibetan saying: ‘When things are difficult, then let yourself be happy.’ Otherwise, if happiness is relying on others or the environment or your surroundings, it’s not possible. Like an ocean, the waves always go like that but underneath, it always remains calm. So we have that ability as well. On an intellectual level, we may see things as desperate, difficult. But underneath, at the emotional level, you can keep calm.
The Dalai Lama
People who practice mindfulness find that they don’t have to trust the narrative self –
that its lost its hold over them as the primary reference of truth and reality.
It’s such a sweet thing
To go from having been habitually convinced by this narrative self, to no longer being convinced by it, is a huge shift.
Henry Shukman, Mountain Cloud Zen Center
We rarely contact this simple moment,
so used to constant input and excitement,
we lack fine-tuning into all the subtleties of this instant, the ability to register a quiet aliveness without the stirring of expectation.
Toni Packer, 1927-2013, teacher and writer.
Develop a mind that alights nowhere
The Lotus Sutra
For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“don’t love your life
too much,” it said,
and vanished into the world.
Mary Oliver, One or Two Things
The notion of a spirituality of subtraction comes from Meister Eckhart (c.1260-1327), the medieval Dominican mystic. He said the spiritual life has much more to do with subtraction than it does with addition. Yet I think most Christians today are involved in great part in a spirituality of addition.
The capitalist worldview is the only one most of us have ever known. The nature of the capitalist mind is that things (and often people!) are there for me. Finally, even God becomes an object for my consumption. Religion looks good on my résumé, and anything deemed “spiritual” is a check on my private worthiness list. Some call it spiritual consumerism. It is not the Gospel.
Richard Rohr, Radical Grace
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