Drink your tea slowly and reverently,
as if it is the axis
on which the world earth revolves
– slowly, evenly, without
rushing toward the future;
Live the actual moment.
Only this moment is life.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Tag: Awareness
All starts with thoughts
Watch your thoughts, they become words.
Watch your words, they lead to actions.
Watch your actions, they create habits.
Watch your habits, they build your character.
Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.
Upanishads
Not complicated, but not easy
Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience.
It isn’t more complicated than that.
It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it.
Sylvia Boorstein
Keep your mind calm….
On an evening when an Irish golfer needs to stay focused, some thoughts on a key early practice in meditation. Being mindful means we work on our capacity to simply watch our thoughts and emotions, allowing them pass through a stable field of awareness without disturbing it excessively. To do this we need to strengthen our capacity to let go of distractions and the running after happiness by creating a calmness and constancy in the mind that observes good and bad with an equal ability to accept things as they are. This capacity to focus – to be one-pointed in our attention – is at the heart of our freedom from anxiety:
Concentration is the cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. You can think of concentration as the capacity of the mind to sustain an unwavering attention on one object of observation.…….. A calmness develops with concentration practice that has a remarkable stable quality to it. It is steadfast, profound, hard to disturb, no matter what comes up. You can look deeply into something if you sustain your looking without being constantly thrown off by distractions or the agitation of your own mind.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, there you are.
…..and learn to let go
The incredibly warm weather means that the birds are everywhere and active. The first swallows have returned. Birdsong fills the air at dawn and dusk. And they are busy….finding worms, building nests and testifying to life. We can learn so much about what leads to real happiness from how Nature works. When we are close to nature , in the mountains or in the garden, we touch into a wisdom within our deepest selves, as Mark Nepo did, observing a robin building a nest:
It was a small thing, watching the robin carry a twig too big for its nest. It tried once, then twice to use it, and somehow…it knew it was no good. It simply flew off and picked another.
I went and found the twig. I rolled it in my hand and thought of the times I’ve labored, trying to make things too big fit. So often what we want is like that twig, too big to be of use, and we stay lodged in an unhappiness created by holding on to something that cannot complete our nest.
It was humbling to watch a small bird work, singing as it went, leaving what it couldn’t use as it found it. If we could only treat each other with such simple kindness.
from The Book of Awakening
Teens Day 13: Holding onto our thoughts
Sometimes we find that we like our thoughts so much
that we don’t want to let them go
Pema Chodron
