Not adding more

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

Sunday Quote: The secret

The secret of Zen is just two words: not always so.

[In Japanese it is two words] 

Suzuki Roshi

A solid center

Many have gone mad looking for a solid center,
but there is none.

We think of centering as only a continual narrowing
of focus until we touch the pearl
but in practice it is often a continual expansion
of focus until we become the ocean.

Our center is vast space, boundless awareness
indistinguishable from unconditional love.

Stephen Levine

Labels

Sometimes it is better, when we we feel groundless and uncertain, to resist the drive to make a situation right or wrong, and instead to trust in an underlying flow.

Once the whole is divided, the parts need names.
There are already enough names.
One must know when to stop.
Knowing when to stop averts trouble.

All things end in the Tao, like a river flowing home to the sea.

Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, 32

How do you know?

Try not to resist the changes that come your way.
Instead, let life live through you.

And do not worry that your life is turning upside down.
How do you know that the side you are used to
is better than the one to come?

Rumi

A mind at rest

Without a story, the fragments won’t settle.

Lia Purpura, 1964 – , American poet