Tag: Awareness

Noticing ordinary perfection

Karl Duffy2 Comments

rain unbrella

To overcome perfectionism, you’d have to learn to accept reality for what it is at any given moment. I can imagine the objections: ” What? Accept the reality as it is? You must be kidding me!” Not at all. There are two reasons to accept reality as it is. First, there is no other reality at any given point in time than the one that there is. We can think of things being different from how they are at this period in time, but this hypothetically better, ideal reality exists only in our minds. In reality, there is just reality. So what is there to accept but this? The second reason for accepting the present reality as it is? It’s already perfect.

Pavel Somov, Present Perfect

The bridge

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File:Puente de hamaca.JPG

Breath is the bridge that connects life to consciousness, the bridge that unites your body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold of your mind again

Thich Nhat Hanh

photo: chixoy

Step by step

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File:River Rothay stepping stones 120508w.jpg

You do not need to know precisely what is happening,

or exactly where it is all going.

What you need, is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment,

and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.

Thomas Merton

photo: strobilomyces

Moving beyond concepts

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File:Morning Mist.jpg

We must not portray you in king’s robes,
you drifting mist that brought forth the morning.

Once again from the old paintboxes
we take the same gold for scepter and crown
that has disguised you through the ages.

Piously we produce our images of you
till they stand around you like a thousand walls.
And when our hearts would simply open,
our fervent hands hide you.

Rilke, Book of Hours, I 4

A way to freedom

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path44

The attempt to look at your attitude — what you are feeling and thinking and the frame that holds it –

and then your attitude to your attitude,

is one of the routes to freedom

John Tarrant, In the Wild Places

Not going anywhere in life

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I have tried to stress the critical importance of the non-dual aspect of meditation by emphasizing that it is not about getting anywhere else. This of course immediately brings up a lot of bewilderment in people, because almost everything we do seems to be about trying to get somewhere else. Why on earth would you not want to get somewhere else? If you’re in a lot of pain, or if you have some kind of illness or whatever, you always want to get back to where you were, or get to some better place in the future. It sounds almost un-American just to settle for what is, but that is a misunderstanding of the potential for living in the present moment. It’s not a matter of settling. It’s a matter of recognizing that, in some sense, it never gets any better than this.

Jon Kabat Zinn.