Tag: Awareness

This Sunday, stop, be aimless…..

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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. We already have everything we are looking for, everything we want to become. Just be. Just being in the moment in this place is the deepest practice of meditation. The Heart Sutra says that there is “nothing to attain.”  We don’t need to search anywhere. We don’t need to practice to obtain some high position. We can enjoy every moment. People talk about entering nirvana, but we are already there. We have everything we need to make the present moment the happiest in our life, even if we have a cold or a headache. We don’t have to wait until we get over our cold to be happy. Having a cold is part of life. 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

Sunday Quote: Looking within

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I can give you nothing that has not already its origins within yourself.

I can throw open no picture gallery but your own.

I can help make your own world visible…. that is all.

Herman Hesse

Quietening the mind

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Inside me a hundred beings are putting their fingers to their lips and saying,

“That’s enough for now.  Shhhhh.”

Silence is an ocean.   Speech is a river.

When the ocean is searching for you, don’t walk

to the language-river.

Listen to the ocean,

and bring your talky business to an end.

Rumi, Send the Chaperones Away

Stop fixing and choosing and doing and making….

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The engine that makes this go is taking a step back and trusting the body, trusting the breath, trusting the heart. We’re living our lives madly trying to hold onto everything, and it looks like it might work for awhile but in the end it always fails, and it never was working, and the way to be happy, the way to be loving, the way to be free is to really be willing to let go of everything on every occasion or at least to make that effort. So the practice really works with sitting down, returning awareness to the body, returning awareness to the breath. It usually involves sitting up straight and opening up the body and lifting the body so that the breath can be unrestrained. And then returning the mind to the present moment of being alive, which is anchored in the breath, in the body.

Then, of course, other things happen. You have thoughts, you have feelings. You might have a pain, an ache, visions, memories, reflections. All these things arise, but instead of applying yourself to them and getting entangled in them, you just bear witness to it, let it go, come back to the breathing and the body, and what happens is you release a whole lot of stuff in yourself. A whole new process comes into being that would not have been there if you were always fixing and choosing and doing and making. This way you’re allowing something to take place within your heart.

Norman Fischer

Noticing the effects of a frantic age 4: Shutting out

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In a world of dwindling resources, where each person’s share of the physical realm decreases over time, it is no wonder that physical reality fails to satisfy. But thanks to the new, intimate, glowing handheld mobile devices, the unsatisfactory real world can be blotted out, and replaced with a cleansed, bouncy, shiny version of society in which little avatars utter terse little messages. In the cyber-realm there are no sweaty bodies, no cacophony of voices to suffer through — just a smooth, polished, expertly branded user experience.

While riding the subway through the Boston rush hour, I have been able to observe just how well these personal electronic mental life support units work in shielding people from the sight of their fellow-passengers…. with more and more people in obvious distress. By focusing all of their attentions on the tiny screen, they are also spared the sight of our well-worn and crumbling urban infrastructure. It is as if the physical world doesn’t really exist for them, or at least doesn’t matter. But as Masanobu Fukuoka put it, “If we throw Mother Nature out the window, she comes back through the door with a pitchfork,” and as we ignore the physical realm, the physical economy (the one that actually keeps people fed and sheltered and moves them about the landscape) shrinks and decays.

Dmitry Orlov

When we are hurt in our life

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Sitting with and through all sorts of conditions that don’t fit our picture of how we want our life to go may be a far more valuable practice than being able to settle into a calm or blissful quiet. When we sit we are doing two things. First, sitting becomes a container; whatever has happened we sit still and feel it. The other side of sitting is the stillness of non-reactivity. We feel all…without doing anything to anybody. The feeling becomes our own responsiblity. Instead of our attention being directed, as it usually is, to making somebody else treat us differently, the way we want to be treated, we come back to experiencing what is at stake in being treated this way, what the hurt is really all about, and who we think we are that we can be hurt.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness