Beginning in infancy (or even before) each of us, in response to perceived threats to our well-being, develops a false self: a set of protective behaviors driven at root by a sense of need and lack. The essence of the false self is driven, addictive energy, consisting of tremendous emotional investment in compensatory “emotional programs for happiness.”
Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening
We live the given life, and not the planned
Wendell Berry
What is right today is wrong tomorrow
Ryokan, 1758 – 1831, Japanese Zen monk and poet
Next time is next time.
Now is now
The words of Hirayama in the beautiful, meditative, film Perfect Days, to his niece who wants to know when they will go to see the ocean.
It sums up his whole philosophy of life
Therefore, tell me:
what will engage you?
What will open the dark fields of your mind,
like a lover
at first touching?
Mary Oliver, Flare
One way of dealing with the inner critic, found in many different traditions, East and West:
So the holy elders,” I added, “claim that the best strategy to cope with troublesome logismoi [thoughts] is simply to ignore them.” “Precisely. Our first defense against destructive logismoi is complete indifference. This is the healthiest and most productive method to head them off right at their inception. Ignore them completely. Never open up a dialogue with these intruders. Do not interact with them either out of curiosity or out of overconfidence.”
Kyriacos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence: a search for Orthodox Spirituality
Feastday of Saint Francis of Assisi
The tree which moves some to tears of joy, is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.
Some see nature all ridicule and deformity … and some scarce see nature at all.
But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
William Blake
Mindfulbalance 