Tag: Awareness

During a lifetime of many small disappointments, betrayals, threats and the rest, we develop a tough skin over our sensitivity, and a feeling that happiness is something we have to seek out. Eventually, there is so much hide protecting the heart that the innate joy of being alive becomes inaccessible. Many people would not even guess that happiness is an innate state of being, independent of circumstances. The Buddha found that happiness in the purity of his heart, and called that innate purity of being ‘unconditioned’. It is unconditioned because it is not dependent on conditions.

Ajahn Sucitto

When thoughts swarm like flies, pay them no attention.

Do not wrestle with them; do not entertain them.

Let them pass as if they were nothing,

and return to that silent, nameless yearning for the Ultimate

The Cloud of Unknowing, 14th Century anonymous work on Christian meditation

Someone once asked me, ‘How do you bear the suffering of the world?’ 

I said, ‘I make my mind bigger.’ 

There’s always enough room when we stop conflating ‘being with’ and ‘being overwhelmed by.’

Sylvia Boorstein

In Zen archery, the archer doesn’t shoot the arrow; the arrow shoots itself. The moment you aim, you’ve already missed. This is the paradox of wu wei: the harder you try, the more you obstruct the flow. But when you surrender all trying, the universe acts through you. A dancer becomes the dance; a singer becomes the song. There’s no separation between the artist and the art.

This is why Lao Tzu says, ‘The Tao never acts, yet nothing is left undone.’ The sun doesn’t decide to shine; the rain doesn’t intend to fall. They simply follow their nature. When we align with this same spontaneity, our actions become as inevitable and effortless as breathing

Stephen Mitchell, The Way of Effortless Action: Wu Wei in Zen and Taoism