Tag: Awareness

Noticing

Karl Duffy4 Comments

 

It is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain

Mary Oliver, Daisies

Your first thought

Karl Duffy2 Comments

 

Imagine whenever you meet anybody, your habitual, instinctive first thought is, I wish for this person to be happy.

Having such habits changes everything at work, because this sincere goodwill is picked up unconsciously by others, and you create the type of trust that leads to highly productive collaborations. Such habits can be volitionally trained.

 C-M Tan, Search inside yourself. The unexpected path to achieving success, happiness (and world peace). 

Being carried

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 Sometimes I go about in pity for myself,

and all the while,

a great wind carries me across the sky

Ojibwe Tribe saying.  The Ojibwe are one one of the largest Indigenous ethnic groups in the US and Canada.

Living life fully

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Today is Valentines day, normally celebrated with a special meal and even chocolates. It is also Ash Wednesday in the Christian tradition, a day of fasting, the start of Lent – a season of simplification. They seem quite opposed as celebrations.

However, both are reminders that our lives are short,  and that we should live them with passion and to the fullest, appreciating, and celebrating fully, beauty as it appears in each day  .

In the school of mind

you learn a lot,

And become a true scholar for many to look up to.

In the school of love

you become a child

to learn again

Abu-Said Abil-Kheir, Sufi Poet, 967 – 1049

Don’t look to others

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Every person has a vocation to be someone:

but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation

he can only be one person: himself.

Thomas Merton

Master Rinzai said ‘Place no head above your own’.

That is, to look outside of ourselves for true peace and satisfaction is hopeless.

Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

Underneath the grey clouds

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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