True meditation is making everything — coughing, swallowing, waving, movement and stillness, speaking and acting, good and evil, fame and shame, loss and gain, right and wrong — into one single koan.
Hakuin, Zen teacher, 1685 – 1768.
photo russavia
Tag: Awareness
Sunday Quote: Fresh eyes
Nothing’s worth noting that is not seen with fresh eyes.
Bashō, (1644 – 1694)
It’s Saturday: Do nothing
Doing nothing does not mean going to sleep, but it does mean resting — resting the mind by being present to whatever is happening in the moment, without adding on the effort of attempting to control it. Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.
Sharon Salzberg, How Doing Nothing Can Help You Truly Live
No point comparing: This moment is all there is
Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic or visible, plant or animal, extinct or living. So there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or to heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known. The particulars count
Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, There you are
Not aiming
Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.
Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run — in the long-run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Having an attentive eye
To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty,
and in the same field, it beholds, every hour,
a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
