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).
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.
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
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
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
