Even on a grey snowy morning like this one…
The mind is luminous, brightly shining, and this is never absent. However, it is sullied by incoming defilements, coloured by the thoughts and emotions that people put upon it. If you were to see the luminous freedom of the mind, you would cultivate it before anything else, keeping it free from all attachments
Anguttara Nikaya, early Buddhist scripture
Whenever we give ourselves to whatever presents itself, instead of grasping and holding it, we flow with it. We do not arrest the flow of reality, we do not try to possess, we do not try to hold back, but we let go, and everything is alive as long as we let it go. When we cut the flower it is no longer alive; when we take water out of the river it is just a bucketful of water, not the flowing river; when we take air and put it in a balloon it is no longer the wind. Everything that flows and is alive has to be taken and given at the same time – taken with a very, very light touch. Here again we are not playing off give against take, but learning to balance the two in a genuine response to living as well as to dying.
David Stendhal Rast osb
Do not seek perfection in a changing world.
Instead perfect your love.
Master Sengstan, Third Zen Patriarch, 7th C AD
The hardest thing I have learned and still struggle with
is that I don’t have to be finished
to be whole
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
With training, we can become mindful of the patterns of thought that condition our perception. The task in meditation is to drop below the level of the repeated recorded message, to sense and feel the energy that brings it up. When we can do this, and truly come to terms with the feeling, the thought will no longer need to arise, and the pattern will naturally fade away.
Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart
This is the simple truth
– that to live is to feel oneself lost –
He who accepts it has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground.
José Ortega y Gasset, Who Rules the World.
Mindfulbalance 