Tag: Awareness

That’s the key

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The teachings about recognizing egolessness sound quite abstract, but the path quality of that, the magic instruction that we have all received, the golden key is that part of the meditation technique where you recognize what’s happening with you and you say to yourself, “Thinking.” Then you let go of all the talking and the fabrication and discussion, and you’re left just sitting with the weather – the quality and the energy of the weather itself. Maybe you still have that quaky feeling or that churning feeling or that exploding feeling or that calm feeling or that dull feeling, as if you’d just been buried in the earth. You’re left with that. That’s the key: come to know that. 

Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape

Good questions

Karl Duffy1 Comment

As long as we are breathing,  there are infinite possibilities.

A good starting point is with a question: What if I completely let go of the fear body and were released from the gloomy future it predicted? And then another question: In the absence of fear what would I want my life to be about? And then another: In the absence of fear,  what would motivate me toward that life?

As we ask these questions and feel the resistance they provoke, we begin to recognize how hypnotized we are by the fear body. Recognizing our own neurosis is the beginning of freedom. 

Tim Burkett, Nothing Holy About it, The Zen of Being Just Who You Are

Listen

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Wait awhile, close your eyes, let your breathing stop three seconds or so, listen to the inside silence in the womb of the world, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, re-recognize the bliss you forgot, the emptiness and essence and ecstasy of ever having been and ever to be the golden eternity. This is the lesson you forgot.

Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity

A lightness of touch

Karl Duffy1 Comment

If we do our work with a focus on future results or only for those who are “deserving”, we are likely to start judging others and ourselves. Similarly, if we focus on ‘the way it should be’,  we get frustrated when it does not turn out that way.

Staying in the present moment, holding things lightly and with generosity, changes things; it is joyful and promotes gratitude

The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection;

The water has no mind to retain their image.

Zen poem from the Zenrin-kushū, a 15th Century compilation of Zen writings

A new morning

Karl Duffy3 Comments

If only we could have this understanding each new day…

Nothing
in the world
is usual today.
This is
the first morning

Izumi Shikibu, born 976, Japanese poet.

She is considered the greatest poet of the Heian period

Under the shadows

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence.

When the mind has settled, we are
established in our essential nature, which
is unbounded consciousness.

Our essential nature is usually overshadowed
by the activity of the mind.

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.