Take the time

It takes a long time to sift through the more superficial voices of your own gift in order to enter into the deep signature and tonality of your Otherness. When you speak from that deep, inner voice, you are really speaking from the unique tabernacle of your own presence. There is a voice within you that no one, not even you, has ever heard. Give yourself the opportunity of silence and begin to develop your listening in order to hear, deep within yourself, the music of your own spirit.

John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World

How to live life

Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don’t live your life, but life lives you.

Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.

Eckhart Tolle, A new Earth: Awakening to your Life’s Purpose

Clear flowing water

Our original nature is like clear water. Born again into a world of wildly changing forms, though having no essential form of our own, we take on the shapes of the containers we are poured into. We become sons or daughters and are told to think of ourselves in that manner. Acculturated, we bend to the curves of that arbitrary modality. Slowly we freeze into that shape. The straighter and harder the edge the more we are praised as being someone of merit….

But water is water. Melting, it remembers; evaporating, it ascends. When you let go of control of the universe, when you let go of everything, only the truth remains. Your actions come out of the present. There is no force. Fully present. Able to respond, not out of personal desire, but out of a sense of the appropriateness of things. You respond from the flow itself, or perhaps better stated, the flow responds to itself. Letting go of the little mind, of your suffering, is simpler than you think, though it’s the hardest work you will ever do.

Stephen Levine,  A Gradual Awakening

Sunday Quote: What’s needed

Bien commencer amène à bien terminer

A good beginning makes for a good conclusion

French proverb

Wings will be given

You are uneasy riding the body?

Dismount. Travel lighter. Wings will be given.

Be clear like a mirror, reflecting nothing.
Be clean of pictures and the worry that comes with images.

Gaze into what is not ashamed or afraid of any truth.

Contain all human faces in your own without any judgment of them.
Be pure emptiness.

What is inside that? you ask. Silence is all I can say.

Lovers have some secrets That they keep.

Rumi

Complicating things

Dhamma is simple:

Live with love and be aware.
It is only the mind that complicates this teaching and says that it is not enough.

Michael Kewley, Former Buddhist monk, currently teaching courses on Awareness and meditation