A new moon teaches gradualness
and deliberation and how one gives birth
to oneself slowly. Patience with small details
makes perfect a large work, like the universe.
What nine months of attention does for an embryo
forty early mornings will do for your gradually growing wholeness
Rumi
When we sit in meditation, we cease some of the restless moving of the mind, even if briefly. These periods of rest and ease switch off the grasping mind which always wants more. We stop, and realize that happiness is already available.
In the Buddha’s time there lived a killer called Angulimala… When Angulimala had one last victim to kill, he saw the Buddha coming down the road. Angulimala ran toward the Buddha with his sword, with the intent to kill his last victim and complete his task. The Buddha was walking slowly and it seemed Angulimala would have no difficulty in finishing him off, but the young man found that he could not catch up to the master, even though the Buddha appeared to not be moving at all. Angulimala finally called out to the Buddha in frustration, “Stop!”. The Buddha replied “Angulimala I have already stopped for the sake of all beings. It is you who has not stopped”
Angulimala was so moved that he abandoned his ways and became a monk…Soon he became an arhat, a liberated person, and entered nirvana.
Guo Gu, Silent Illumination
Lent begins today in the Christian tradition – a 40 day period of simplification in order to notice what is important.
There is a basket of fresh bread on your head, yet you go door to door asking for crusts. Knock on the inner door, no other.
Sloshing knee-deep in fresh riverwater,
yet you keep asking for other people’s waterbags.
Water is everywhere around you, but you see
only the barriers that keep you from water.
The horse is beneath the rider’s thighs,
and still you ask, “Where’s my horse?”
Right there, under you!
“Yes, this is a horse, but where’s the horse?”
Can’t you see it?
“Yes, I can see, but whoever saw such a horse?”
Mad with thirst, you can’t drink from the stream running close by your face. You are like a pearl on the deep bottom wondering inside the shell,
Where’s the ocean? Those mental questioning form the barrier. Stay bewildered inside God, and only that.
When you are with everyone but me, you’re with no one.
When you are with no one but me, you’re with everyone.
Instead of being so bound up with everyone, be everyone.
When you become that many, you’re nothing. Empty.
Rumi, in Coleman Barks, Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing
When practicing mindfulness, even directed toward something as ordinary as breathing, we enhance the part of the mind that is aware of the way things are, while diminishing the part that is stressed because things are not the way we want them to be.
Andrew Olendzki, What’s in a Word? Sati
Never bear more than one trouble at a time.
Some people bear three kinds – all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.
Edward Everett Hale, 1822 – 1909, American author, historian, and Unitarian minister,
Silence refers to the fact that we are originally free from all narratives and constructs of self. Mind precedes everything; it is the precursor to experience. So in understanding the nature of mind and gaining insight, you see that all things are impermanent, all things have no abidance, and are intimately connected. That is the realization of no-self, selflessness. This true nature of our mind is free from the coming and going of fragmented, scattered, discriminating thoughts....You don’t have to do anything to make them to disappear. I often give the analogy that this room we’re in – its spaciousness – is really not affected by all the furniture and the people in it.
Guo Gu, Silent Illumination
Mindfulbalance 