Tag: balance

One method I learned from my teacher, Diana Winston, is elegantly simple. In your meditation, simply add a few words to each time you notice your attention wandering: May I meet this too with kindness. Whatever comes up, repeat this phrase of loving-kindness toward your thoughts, feelings, or sensations.

See if you can notice how it feels to meet yourself with kindness instead of judgment or reaction. And then, as you move through the day, try repeating the same phrase – “may I meet this, too, with kindness” – whenever you notice you are being hard on yourself, judgmental toward yourself, or unkind in any way. Often, learning to meet yourself with kindness can feel like the medicine your heart and inner life yearns for, especially if you’re used to meeting yourself with all kinds of judgment and past conditioning.

Finally, see if you can extend this intention toward anything that happens in your day, or to anyone you encounter, especially when things aren’t going the way you would like them to. Lean into the intention to meet all that is here with kindness.

Amanda Gilbert, May I Meet This, Too, With Kindness

The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it’s sweet, and sometimes it’s bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy.

From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience.

Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape

We do not search for love because it is absent

it seems to be absent because we search for it

Rupert Spira, Transparent Body, Luminous World.

When the mind is calm and spacious, we see things more clearly. Instead of being caught in habitual reactions, we have the freedom to pause, to breathe, and to choose how we respond. That space between stimulus and response is where wisdom arises. It’s where we remember that we don’t have to be ruled by every passing thought or emotion. In that spaciousness, kindness and clarity can emerge, and we can meet life with greater ease.

Sylvia Boorstein