As we look forward to starting another month …
To dare is to lose one’s footing temporarily;
to not dare, is to lose one’s life
Søren Kierkegaard
The Choice
Tag: Awareness
Not adding more
Not adding to our inevitable difficulties by lamenting, resisting, feeling sorry for ourselves, or making them into the story of our lives. One of the Buddhas most useful teachings: how we speak to ourselves about our challenges reduces our suffering.
Now a well-instructed person, when touched with a feeling of pain, does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. So he feels one pain: physical, but not mental. As they are touched by that painful feeling, they are not resistant. No resistance-obsession with regard to that painful feeling consumes them.
Just as if they were to shoot a person with an arrow and, right afterward, did not shoot them with another one, so that they would feel the pain of only one arrow. In the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the well-instructed person does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. They feels one pain: physical, but not mental
Their accepting or rejecting are scattered, gone to their end, do not exist. Knowing the dustless, sorrowless state, they discern rightly, are beyond becoming, have gone to the Further Shore.
The Buddha, The Sallatha Sutta
Stay Alert
Nobody said it was easy, to stay in the fire, stay alert, and forebear.
But the alternative is to suffer what is, anyway,
but with no true or reliable relationship with it
Susan Murphy, Upside-Down Zen
A solid center
Many have gone mad looking for a solid center,
but there is none.
We think of centering as only a continual narrowing
of focus until we touch the pearl
but in practice it is often a continual expansion
of focus until we become the ocean.
Our center is vast space, boundless awareness
indistinguishable from unconditional love.
Stephen Levine
Resting kindly
Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world, that we did not make, that has no price?
Where is our sanity but there?
Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world?
Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace
Ingrained filters
Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth.
The Diamond Sutra
Working with this koan alters how I might meet the world in two ways. In one twist, it opens life up in a way where I can’t expect anything to happen outside of the now, and in another, the koan takes my attention to my thoughts and opinions about what I come into contact with each moment. …
The fact that I take mundane shrubs, trees, stray cats, and rain squalls for granted or even consider them to be inconvenient nuisances is something the koan quietly forces me to examine more closely. What would life be like without these images, moments, and experiences? Do I create an inner world in which only some of what is present makes it through my ingrained mental filters? If yes, what would happen if I deconstructed these borders and removed them? Maybe everything that graces my life has a subtle extraordinariness and that allowing this connection to blossom on its own is a practice that takes place naturally when I just begin to notice.
Don Dianda, commentary on Zen koans in the Huffington Post
Mindfulbalance 