Don’t prolong the past,
don’t invite the future,
don’t be deceived by appearances,
just dwell in present awareness.
Patrul Rinpoche
photo ian paterson
Tag: balance
Grounded
The emphasis in working life is to get things done, get results and move things on, which can give each day a driven quality and make moment-to-moment awareness difficult. Grounding ourselves every now and then in the body and attuning simply and calmly to the breath can help us remain balanced, and allows us let go of some of the ways we can get locked into fixed positions:
May we learn to return
And rest in the beauty
Of animal being,
Learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
and with freed senses
feel the earth breathing with us.
John O’Donoghue, “To Learn from Animal Being”
photo Ireen Trummer
Kindness with ourselves today
In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy… all these are undoubtedly great virtues… But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea, the very fiend himself – that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved – what then?
Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, Chapter V, “Psychotherapy or the Clergy,” 519-520
photo ras67
Noticing the ordinary
Never forget that every mind is shaped by the most ordinary experiences.
To say that something is ordinary is to say that it is of the kind that has made the biggest contribution to the formation of your most basic ideas
Paul Valéry, French poet and philosopher, 1871 – 1945
photo jorge royan
Holding on too tightly
Not that difficult to grasp in the weather here in Ireland this last week. Not so easy to grasp in our inner lives:
Nothing in its essence is one way or the other. All around us the wind, the fire, the earth, and the water, are always taking on different qualities; they’re like magicians. We also change like the weather. We ebb and flow like the tides, we wax and wane like the moon. We fail to see that like the weather, we are fluid, not solid.
And so we suffer.
Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty
photo of clouds in Malahide, Dublin, by Miguel Mendez
How we choose to tell the story
We stick to the wrong thing quite often, not because it will come to fruition by further effort, but because we cannot let go of the way we have decided to tell the story and we become further enmeshed even by trying to make sense of what entraps us, when what is needed is a simple, clean breaking away. To remove our selves entirely and absolutely, abruptly and at times un-compromisingly is often the real and radically courageous break for freedom.
David Whyte, ‘Withdrawal’ From Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
photo waffen5
