Tag: Awareness

Darkness into light

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In the Christian Calendar today is the feast of Candlemas, reflecting the deep human need to mark this period between the winter and the spring solstices. The celebration of light gave encouragement in those years when the darkness seemed to be never-ending. This can also apply to the seasons in our lives

Any deep wound or loss can be transformed into fierce grace when we meet the pain with a caring presence. We can find grace I the immediacy of a frightening experience or in working with long-held trauma. Although the pain fo trauma may lead us to believe that our spirit has been tainted or destroyed, that isn’t so. Waves of fear or shame may possess us temporarily, but as we continue to entrust ourselves to loving presence, as we let ourselves feel loved, our lives become more and more an expression of who or what we are.

This is the essence of grace – homecoming to who we are.

Tara Brach

End of the first month: Taking Stock on the journey

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Sometimes the programming we grew up with is not the best tool for cultivating appreciation and contentment, especially our deep-rooted impulse to imagine how much better things could be than they actually are now.

My progress report
concerning my journey to the palace of wisdom is discouraging.
I lack certain indispensable aptitudes.
Furthermore, it appears
that I packed the wrong things.

James Baldwin, 1924 – December 1, 1987, American Writer, Inventory/ On Being 52 in Jimmy Blues: And other poems

Your own master

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Do you know where the disease lies which keeps you from reaching enlightenment? It lies where you have no faith in yourself.

When faith in yourself is lacking you find yourself hurried by others in every possible way. At every encounter you are no longer your own master; you are driven about by others this way and that. All that is required is all at once to cease leaving yourself in search of something external. When this is done you will find yourself no different from the Buddha.

From the Rinzai Roku, the recorded sayings and doings of Zen master Rinzai Gigen Zenji, died 866 CE

How we see

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Consumed with anger,
The world is an ugly place.


Bathed in happiness,
The world is a wonderful place.


But….aha! It’s the same world.

Taitetsu Unno, 1929 – 2014, scholar and author on Pure Land Buddhism, Shin Buddhism: Bits of Rubble turn into Gold

Knowing Eggs

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Once, when I was in college, I wrote home complaining about the food, and my mother sent me a Julia Child cookbook. In the book was a section on dealing with eggs in which she said that the sign of a really good cook is knowing eggs. And so I took an egg out. You can watch an egg – you can learn certain things just by watching it, but you don’t learn very much. To learn about eggs you have to put them in a pan and try to make something out of them. If you do this long enough you begin to understand that there are variations in eggs, and there are certain ways that they react to heat and ways that they react to oil or butter or whatever. And so by actually working with the egg and trying to make something out of it, you really come to understand eggs.

And it’s the same with the mind: unless you actually try to make something out of the mind, try to get a mental state going and keep it going, you don’t really know your own mind. You don’t know the processes of cause and effect within the mind. There has to be a factor of actual participation in the process. That way you can understand it. This all comes down to being observant and developing a skill. 

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, The Path of Concentration & Mindfulness

Daily prayers

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What I know in my bones is that I forgot to take time to remember what I know.

The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy.

Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.

Terry Tempest Williams, 1955 – American writer, educator, conservationist, Talking to God: Portrait of a World at Prayer.