Tag: balance

How much we are missing

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Everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is a measure of our gratefulness. Day and night, gifts keep pelting down on us. If we were aware of this, gratefulness would overwhelm us. But we go through life in a daze.

A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is; a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep. How much we are missing in life by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them.

Eyes see only light, ears hear only sound, but a listening heart perceives meaning. Everything is a gift.

Gratefulness is the key to a happy life, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy – because we will always want to have something else or something more.

David Steindl-Rast

Sunday Quote: Ceasing the struggle

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Spiritual practice is not about accomplishing anything — not about winning or losing — but about ceasing to struggle and relaxing as it is.

Pema Chodron

A constant journey

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Our life is a constant journey, from birth to death. The landscape changes, the people change, our needs change, but the train keeps moving.

Life is the train, not the station.

Paulo Coelho

Grounded

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While sitting on the floor of a room in Japan and looking out on a small garden with flowers blooming and dragon flies hovering in space, I sensed that this small world, almost underfoot, shall I say, had a validity all its own, but must be realized and appreciated from its own level in space.

I suddenly felt I had too long been exclusively above my boots.

Mark George Tobey, 1890 – 1976, American painted, strongly influenced by Asian calligraphy.

The Choice

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As we look forward to starting another month …

To dare is to lose one’s footing temporarily;

to not dare, is to lose one’s life

Søren Kierkegaard

Not adding more

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Not adding to our inevitable difficulties by lamenting, resisting, feeling sorry for ourselves, or making them into the story of our lives. One of the Buddhas most useful teachings: how we speak to ourselves about our challenges reduces our suffering.

Now a well-instructed person, when touched with a feeling of pain, does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. So he feels one pain: physical, but not mental. As they are touched by that painful feeling, they are not resistant. No resistance-obsession with regard to that painful feeling consumes them.

Just as if they were to shoot a person with an arrow and, right afterward, did not shoot them with another one, so that they would feel the pain of only one arrow. In the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the well-instructed person does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. They feels one pain: physical, but not mental

Their accepting or rejecting are scattered, gone to their end, do not exist. Knowing the dustless, sorrowless state, they discern rightly, are beyond becoming, have gone to the Further Shore.

The Buddha, The Sallatha Sutta