Your body is your first home:
“Breathing in, I arrive in my body.
Breathing out, I am home.”
Thich Nhat Hahn
Tag: Awareness
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
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
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
The open space
Yesterday was a lovely Spring morning and I was driving through the beautiful countryside of Co Wicklow to start an MBSR Course in Arklow. The mountains in the distance, the lambs playing in the fields, and the brightness of the light made it easy to feel a mind that was spacious. When that happens I find that I do not struggle with life as much. And our meditation practice is simply that – letting the mind settle, become more spacious and resting in that.
There is a foundation for our lives, a place in which our life rests. That place is nothing but the present moment, as we see, hear, experience what is. If we do not return to that place, we live our lives out of our heads. We blame others; we complain; we feel sorry for ourselves. All of these symptoms show that we’re stuck in our thoughts. We’re out of touch with the open space that is always right here.
Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special
photo j h jansens
Where else
If you are unable to find the truth right where you are,
where else do you expect to find it?
Dōgen
