When you catch yourself thinking, ‘I’m such a failure’ or ‘I’m so enlightened,’ just laugh.
It’s all just more thinking.
The ego loves to dramatize itself, but it’s just a passing show.
Ajahn Sumedho, The Sound of Silence
Just laugh
Tag: Awareness
Sunday Quote: what’s important
I didn’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity;
I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.
Annie Lamott, Traveling Mercies
when the time is right
The trees don’t rush to grow their leaves.
They wait for the right light, the right warmth.
And so must we.
Katrina Kenison, Winter Lessons
lessons from nature
In a life properly lived, you’re a river.
You touch things lightly or deeply;
you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it…
Jim Harrison, 1937 – 2016, American poet, novelist, and essayist.
Simple
The meditation instruction is simple: just sit down, allow yourself to sit with dignity, and pay attention. That’s all.
You don’t have to regard this as some exalted activity you’re doing. It’s just ordinary and profound = being present with yourself.
Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape
The imperfect
A Japanese tea bowl, irregular in shape and glazed in earthy tones, may at first glance seem crude compared to the precision of fine porcelain. Yet its roughness is deliberate – an aesthetic choice that honors the handmade, the asymmetrical, and the imperfect. It invites us to appreciate the beauty of the unrefined, the incomplete, and the transient.
Western art has often pursued an ideal of flawless execution, but this can leave us feeling inadequate in the face of our own imperfections. By contrast, the Wabi-Sabi tradition reminds us that there is profound beauty in the marks of wear, the uneven edge, the faded color – signs that an object has lived, been used, and borne witness to time.
Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art as Therapy
Mindfulbalance 