Once at a workshop, the instruction was to walk mindfully over to the lunchtime food across the room. In that short walk across the room, I noticed how automatically I get ahead of myself — how I lose track of these miraculous feet on the ground and miss the space in between. And I’m beginning to suspect that most of life is “in between“.
David Rynick, This Truth Never fails: A Zen memoir in Four Seasons
The pattern of things….is there from the start. Who you are is there from the beginning. Your task in life is to discern that pattern, listen for it, and give room for it to emerge. More commonly, though, we are all too busy trying to make things happen – to make ourselves happen. We may push and shove through most of a lifetime before realizing that another voice is whispering beneath the fret of our efforts and strategies.
Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Change Your Life
Buddhism teaches that joy and happiness arise from letting go.
Please take an inventory of your life
There are things that you’ve been hanging on to that really are not useful and deprive you of your freedom
Find the courage to let them go.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Michaelmas – the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. A big day in medieval times, with celebrations marking the end of the harvest and the last gathering in. What have we harvested in this year?
Strangely enough, it seems so much easier to remember the hurts, the failures and the rejections. It is much more common to gather our life energy around a hurt than a joy, for some sad reason. Remember the good things even more strongly than the bad, but learn from both. And most of all, as the prophet Baruch said, “rejoice that you are remembered by God” which is the Big Memory that can hold and receive all of the smaller ones.
Richard Rohr, Radical Grace: Daily Meditations
For autumn and its slow growing fruition
For that season of ultimate rise and fall
We give thanks.
May we gracefully rise to the occasion of our own falling,
Giving ourselves just enough time to go beyond time
To the great Now
At the quiet center of the turning wheels.
David Steindl-Rast, osb, Thanksgiving Song
In summary,
healing is a transformation of view, rather than a cure
It involves recognizing your intrinsic wholeness
and simultaneously your interconnectedness with everything else
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Mindfulbalance 