Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle,
and the life of the candle will not be shortened.
Happiness never decreases by being shared.
The Buddha
Tag: Awareness
We see life from how we label our experience
Have you ever noticed that
when you get on the highway at rush hour
that it is everyone else who is the traffic,
never you?
Ajahn Armaro.
Waking to every moment
The journey toward health…
is nothing less than an invitation to wake up to the fullness of our lives.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Watching the leaves float by
Our thoughts are always happening. Much like leaves floating down a stream…If you are standing by a river and a leaf floats by, you have your choice of following the leaf with your eye or keeping your attention fixed in front of you. The leaf floats out of your line of vision. Another leaf enters…and floats by. But as we stand on the bank of the river and the leaves float by, there is no confusion as to whether or not we are the leaves. Similarly, it turns out that there is a place in our minds from which we can watch our own mental images go by. We aren’t our thoughts any more than we are the leaves.
Ram Dass and Paul Gorman
The breath as anchor
Traditionally in mindfulness meditation you use your breath initially as the object of concentration to collect and unify the mind. You typically stay with the experience of the breath as it touches the body in a single spot, such as the tip of the nose or the rise and fall of the chest, or the feeling of the breath in the whole body. When your mind starts wandering, the breath becomes your anchor to which you return in order to stabilize and focus your attention.
Phillip Moffitt
the mind is always judging
The habit of judging our experience locks us into mechanical reactions that we are not even aware of and that often have no objective basis at all. These judgments tend to dominate our minds making it difficult to find any peace wihin ourselves.
It is as if the mind were a yo-yo going up and down on the string of our own judging thoughts all day long.
Jon Kabat Zinn
