The question is not, never, ever, whether or not we will be given challenges and limitations. We will. The question is, how will we hold them, how will we be changed, how will they shape us, what will we bring to the healing of them, what, if anything will be born in its place.
Wayne Muller, A Life of Being, Having and Doing Enough
A good intention for this year would not necessarily be to do more, but to turn up fully for our lives and experience deeply the beauty in each moment:
The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed,
whether or not we will or sense them.
The least we can do is try to be there.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
All endings are also beginnings.
We just don’t know it at the time.
Mitch Albom
Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past.
To come into the present is to stop the war.
Jack Kornfield
Life is known only by those who have found a way to be comfortable with change and the unknown. Given the nature of life, there may be no security, but only adventure.
Rachel Naomi Remen
photo Vienna heldenplatz
Are we intimate with the whole physical movement of fear? Or do we just label it “fear”, say, “I don’t want to feel this way,” and then try everything possible to get away from it, not to experience it? When fear and anxiety actually come into awareness, there is a precious opportunity to experience the whole thing, to go through it completely from beginning to end without any need for escape.
At the first sign of scary, disagreeable physical thoughts and feelings, why not stop and attend? It’s not impossible! “What is going on right now?” Awareness happens for everyone when there is the interest and readiness to be in touch directly, immediately, without description or explanation or diagnosis. When there is intimate touch with what is happening right here, this moment, without any separation…
Separation is this thinking: “I can’t bear it. It’s too much for me. Too dangerous.” Once this physical-mental resistance is directly discovered, it does not continue. Awareness takes its place. It’s like an exchange of energy…
The significant thing is not what it is that is touched and discovered but that there is no separation in being. Then whatever is touched changes. Whatever is there is not the same anymore when it is unconditionally allowed to be there in the fullness of awareness…
Toni Parker, The Light of Discovery
