Not leaning….

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By pausing and accepting our experience, we free ourselves to respond to our circumstances in ways that bring genuine peace and happiness. In a pause, we simply discontinue whatever we are doing. We become wholly present, attentive and, often, physically still.  Try it now: Stop reading and sit there, doing “no thing,” and simply notice what you experience.

Taking our hands off the controls and pausing lets us clearly see the wants and fears that drive us. We become conscious of how the feeling that something is missing or wrong keeps us leaning into the future. We can continue our futile attempt to manage our experience, or we can meet our vulnerability with the wisdom of what I call “radical acceptance.”

Tara Brach

photo greymalkn

Content in being

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The reason why men are so anxious to see themselves,

instead of being content to be themselves,

is that they do not really believe in their own existence. 

Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s True Life

photo 4028mdk09

Sunday Quote: Home

meditation-leaf

Your body is your first home:

“Breathing in, I arrive in my body.

Breathing out, I am home.”

Thich Nhat Hahn

The Basics of Practice 4: Just watch

Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to your own experience. To do this requires that you become aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experience and learn to step back from it.

When we begin practicing paying attention to the activity of our own mind, it is common to discover that we are constantly generating judgments about our experience.

Jon Kabat Zinn

Losing contact with basic goodness

Flowers book

The losing of paradise is enacted over and over again by the children of Adam and Eve. We clothe our souls with messages and doctrines, and lose contact with the great life in the naked breast of nature

Rabindranath Tagore

Does the rose have to do something? No, the purpose of a rose is to be a rose. Your purpose is to be yourself. You don’t have to run anywhere to become someone else. You are wonderful just the way you are. This teaching …. allows us to enjoy ourselves, the blue sky, and everything that is refreshing and healing in the present moment. We already have everything we are looking for, everything we want to become. I am happy in the present moment. I do not ask for anything else. I do not expect any additional happiness. Aimlessness is stopping and realizing the happiness that is already available.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Learning from nature

springbuds

Meditation is really just learning to enjoy your experience, so you don’t have to tense up. Don’t make meditation a project like everything else. The word “natural” is very important. Yesterday I was walking around and it was so beautiful here….We appreciate nature because it’s so uncontrived and unselfconscious. Bring that to mind and know that the body itself has its own intelligence.

Elizabeth Matthis-Namgyel, in Pema Chodron on 4 Keys to Waking Up