Pushing

Statue representing the portrait of Buddha in meditation. Copy space.

There is a quick-fix mentality in Ireland and elsewhere today, which even apply to ways of working on ourselves – like the latest surefire diet, or radio interviews which imply that an instant mindfulness session will cure all ills. At the heart of these is a vision of quick change which encourages us to strive and push to achieve.  We think that we need to control everything and impose ourselves upon it. While useful at times, this  sometimes can mean that we are never happy with anything, including ourselves. Meditation practice encourages a different way, of letting things come to us instead.  We sit in meditation and create space, allowing things unfold in their own time.

To push your self forward to experience and illuminate the millions of things, that is delusion. 

When the millions of things come forward and illuminate themselves, that is freedom

Dogen, GenjoKoan

Balance

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Seek patience
and passion
in equal amounts.

Patience alone
will not build the temple.

Passion alone
will destroy its walls.

Maya Angelou

photo Golden Temple, Kyoto by Ellywa

Sunday Quote: Seeing

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

Mary Oliver, Daisies

Really get a sense of

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In the ongoing truthfulness of our practice, it is really important to sift through all the static and white noise that the emotions and psychologies are setting up — to really see, to get a handle on, what intention feels like in our nervous system. And the quality of attention — how big, or narrow, or tight we feel, how bound we feel when we’re really occupied with a whole series of thoughts, how our attention bunches up — we start to sense this is, in the bodily sense; we get a real sense of the feel of this and the release of that. This is what we practice. This is the dissolving.

Ajahn Sucitto, What if I get it wrong?

Always starting over

dawn sun

There is only one day left,

always starting over:

it is given to us at dawn

and taken away from us at dusk.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Beautiful things

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We live our long, worn days in the shadows, in what often feels like barren, cold winter, so unaware of the miracles that are being created in our spirits. It takes the sudden daylight, some unexpected surprise of life, to cause our gaze to look upon a simple, stunning growth that has happened quietly inside us. Like frost designs on a winter window, they bring us beyond life’s fragmentation and remind us that we are not nearly as lost as we thought we were, that all the time we thought we were dead inside, beautiful things were being born in us

Joyce Rupp, Praying our Goodbyes

photo pauline eccles