Tag: balance

A time for integration

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As we leave the expansiveness of summer and settle into autumn’s rhythms and routines, we may discover a desire or longing to integrate our fresh insights. … All the spiritual traditions of the world acknowledge that wisdom comes from the accrued learnings of our experiences, and this includes those learnings we reap by following someone else’s inspired path for a time. What is at the center of your life at this time? What is your central motivation now? Whenever we have the experience of being ourselves, or of loving what we are doing, we arrive at the center of what is important for us.

Angeles Arrien

Aligned with nature

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Pass through this brief life in accordance with nature…

Gladly…like an olive that ripens and falls…

grateful to the tree that it grew on.

Marcus Aurelius Meditations 4,48

Open the mind and heart

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We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.

So the challenge is to notice the emotional tug of shenpa when it arises and to stay with it for one and a half minutes without the storyline. Can you do this once a day, or many times throughout the day, as the feeling arises? This is the challenge. This is the process of unmasking, letting go, opening the mind and heart.

Pema Chödrön

Let go

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Try to go a whole seven days without having to control everything, without stressing when things don’t work out as you thought they would or should. As you do this, any time you feel the need to take charge, try to relax out of it, just to see what happens. Look for the good that happened precisely because things didn’t work out the way you thought they would or should.

And take your time. There really is no desperate hurry. When we constantly pursue perfection, our life speeds up. We make hasty decisions and snap judgments…. You’ll likely feel relived, and make better choices.

Beth Kempton, Wabi Sabi: Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect life

Becoming

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Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through.

  Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.

This is a kind of death.

Anais Nin

Autumn Clouds

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This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds,
Watching the birth and death of beings is like looking at movements of a dance,
A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky,
Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.

The Buddha, Lalitavistara Sutra, 13.79