De temps en temps,
il est bon de faire une pause dans notre quête du bonheur et juste être heureux.
Now and then
it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness
and just be happy.
Guillaume Apollinaire, French poet, 1880 – 1918
photp ingrid taylar
Tag: Awareness
Mind states that pass through
Many people fail to distinguish between their true nature and their personality traits, particularly their less desirable traits. The fact is you are not the worst characteristics of your personality. It is the nature of the untrained mind to want what it perceives as advantageous and to fear or hate what seems painful. Discovering how your heart and mind can work together to use these feelings allows you to move beyond them. You may feel overwhelmed by the circumstances of your present life or bound by past traumatic events. Again, this is a failure in perception. They are just mind-states which can be known. They can be seen as impermanent and not belonging to you and, therefore, they do not ultimately define your true nature.
Philip Moffitt
Bringing awareness and balance
Meditation is an experiment we are making, bringing us out of our normal habits of intense self-judgment, comparing, and impatience. Mindfulness isn’t about what is happening; it is about how we are relating to what is happening — how much awareness, balance and compassion we are bringing to this moment’s experience, whatever it is.
Sharon Salzberg
Keeping distracted
The best-adjusted person in our society is the person who is not dead and not alive, just numb. When you are fully alive you are constantly saying “No” to many of the processes of society, the racism, the polluted environment, the nuclear threat, the arms race, drinking unsafe water and eating carcinogenic foods. Thus it is in the interest of society to promote those things that take the edge off, keep us busy with our fixes, and keep us slightly numbed-out and zombie-like. In this way our modern consumer society itself functions like an addict.
Anne Wilson Schaef, When Society Becomes an Addict
This Friday, stop looking somewhere else
If you think that peace and happiness are somewhere else and you run after them, you will never arrive. It is only when you realize that peace and happiness are available here in the present moment that you will be able to relax. In daily life, there is much to do and so little time. You may feel pressured to run all the time. Just stop! Touch the ground of the present moment deeply, and you will touch real peace and joy.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Fitting in
A new home decoration show starts on the Irish television channel this evening. The popularity of shows like this at the moment – or ones which look at houses abroad or down the country – and which start when people are a bit down after the Summer holidays, can fuel the anxious, comparing mind. Even how you decorate your home becomes a sign of how well you are doing, or another way to feel that you do not match up:
The need to be normal is the predominant anxiety disorder
in modern life.
Thomas Moore, Original Self
Mindfulbalance 