As a human being, you have the right to get angry; but as a practitioner, you do not have the right to stop practicing.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Everything is practice
Tag: Awareness
The changing nature of everything
Above all, the attitude of Buddhist meditation is one that keeps remembering and focusing on the changing nature of everything. When we witness, listen and relate to sensory experience as change, its power to burn, hold and trap us wanes. There is a sense of dispassion, not through rejection or some other kind of negative attitude to the sensory experience, but just through observing it, bringing the mind fully on to it – as fully as we can. Then the heart grows quiet and still.
Ajahn Sucitto
An ongoing work
When we get our spiritual house in order, we’ll be dead. This goes on. You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty
Flannery O’Connor, 1925 – 1964. American novelist, Letter to Louise Abbott
Even the smallest thing
Every speck of dust has a marvellous soul, but to understand it, one must recover one’s religious and magical sense of things.
Joan Miró, Catalan painter
Reality passing by
We usually do not look into what is really there in front of us. We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those mental objects for reality. We get so caught up in this endless thought-stream that reality flows by unnoticed. We spend our time engrossed in activity, caught up in an eternal flight from pain and unpleasantness. We spend our energies trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to bury our fears. We are endlessly seeking security. Meanwhile, the world of real experience flows by untouched and untasted.
Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness In Plain English
As it is
The biggest error we make in our life … is to think that … our life just as it is, with all of its problems, … has something wrong with it. And because we think that, we get busy... Our life is always all right. … But since we refuse to accept life as it is, because of our preference for things that are pleasurable, we pick and choose from life.
Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen
Mindfulbalance 