What the Buddha said is that you are a verb, not a noun. What you’re doing is what is real, not who’s doing it.
Buddha said this is the basic mistake we all make and is why we suffer.
For example, only walking is real, not the walker or the path. And, the more attached you are to yourself – “you” being a thing – the more trouble you get into.
Mas Kodani, Jodo Shinshu Buddhist teacher
Colder weather, higher fuel and food costs and the presence of a cruel war…
Times of scarcity need to be met with generosity,
times of fear with comfort,
times of uncertainty with presence.
Thomas Hübl
The art of living is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other,
It consists in being sensitive to each moment in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive
Alan Watts
I saw the leaf leave the branch and float down to the soil, dancing joyfully,
because as it floated it saw itself already there in the tree.
It was so happy. I bowed my head,
and I knew that we have a lot to learn from the leaf
because it was not afraid;
it knew that nothing can be born and nothing can die.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Our lives are not beyond this breath there on the chilly glass, but of that breath
and in this life the hands in our mittens are never really empty.
It is all around us, free, this wonderful life: clear jingle of tire chains, the laughter of ice that breaks under our boots. Each hour is a gift to those who take it up.
Ted Kooser, American Pulitzer Prize winning Poet, December
One point that Ajahn Sumedho would stress regularly, is that loving things is not the same as liking them. Having kindness for ourselves or for other beings is not the same as liking everything.
We often come a cropper by trying to make ourselves like everything. This is a completely wrong approach. When we taste something that’s bitter and try to force ourselves to believe it’s sweet this is just falsity, it’s just sugaring things over. It doesn’t work. It just makes the bitter even worse….We’re not trying to like everything, rather we’re recognising that everything belongs. Everything is part of nature: the bitter as well as the sweet, the beautiful as well as the ugly, the cruel as well as the kindly. The heart that recognises that fundamentally everything belongs is what I would describe as being the heart of kindness, the essence of kindness.
Ajahn Amaro, Radical Acceptance
Mindfulbalance 