The biggest error we make in our life … is to think that … our life just as it is, with all of its problems, … has something wrong with it. And because we think that, we get busy... Our life is always all right. … But since we refuse to accept life as it is, because of our preference for things that are pleasurable, we pick and choose from life.
Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen
Losses aren’t cataclysmic if they teach the heart and soul their natural cycle of breaking and healing.
A real tragedy? That’s the loss of the heart and soul themselves. If you’ve abandoned yourself in the effort to keep anyone or anything else, unlearn that pattern. Live your truth, losses be damned. Just like that, your heart and soul will return home.
Martha Beck
When we sit in meditation, we cease some of the restless moving of the mind, even if briefly. These periods of rest and ease switch off the grasping mind which always wants more. We stop, and realize that happiness is already available.
In the Buddha’s time there lived a killer called Angulimala… When Angulimala had one last victim to kill, he saw the Buddha coming down the road. Angulimala ran toward the Buddha with his sword, with the intent to kill his last victim and complete his task. The Buddha was walking slowly and it seemed Angulimala would have no difficulty in finishing him off, but the young man found that he could not catch up to the master, even though the Buddha appeared to not be moving at all. Angulimala finally called out to the Buddha in frustration, “Stop!”. The Buddha replied “Angulimala I have already stopped for the sake of all beings. It is you who has not stopped”
Angulimala was so moved that he abandoned his ways and became a monk…Soon he became an arhat, a liberated person, and entered nirvana.
Guo Gu, Silent Illumination
The first day of Spring in most calendars in the Northern Hemisphere
We learn in our guts, not just in our brain, that a life of joy is not in seeking happiness, but in experiencing and simply being the circumstances of our life as they are.
Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen
The cloud weeps, and then the garden sprouts.
The baby cries, and the mother’s milk flows.
The Nurse of Creation has said, Let them cry a lot.
This rain-weeping and sun-burning twine together
to make us grow. Keep your intelligence white-hot
and your grief glistening, so your life will stay fresh.
Cry easily like a little child.
Rumi
When practicing mindfulness, even directed toward something as ordinary as breathing, we enhance the part of the mind that is aware of the way things are, while diminishing the part that is stressed because things are not the way we want them to be.
Andrew Olendzki, What’s in a Word? Sati
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