Tag: balance

Pushing or pulling

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Many of us don’t allow ourselves to be relaxed. Why do we always try to run and run, even while having our breakfast, while having our lunch, while walking, while sitting? There’s something pushing and pulling us all the time. We make ourselves busy in the hopes of having happiness in the future. In the sutra “Knowing the Better Way to Live Alone,” the Buddha said clearly, “Don’t get caught in the past, because the past is gone. Don’t get upset about the future, because the future is not yet here. There is only one moment for you to be alive, and that is the present moment. Go back to the present moment and live this moment deeply, and you’ll be free.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Moment is perfect

What you love

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It is very important that you only do what you love to do.

You may be poor, you may go hungry, you may lose your car, you may have to move into a shabby place to live, but you will totally live.

And at the end of your days you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do.

Otherwise, you will do things only for a reason, to please other people, and you will never have lived.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Sunday quote: Like the sun

Karl Duffy3 Comments

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If you want to be as clear and refreshing as
the breath of the morning breeze,
be like the sun – have nothing but warmth and light
for everyone.

Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir, 967 – 1049, Persian Sufi poet

photo fitri agung

 

Believing our thoughts

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When thoughts arise, then do all things arise.
When thoughts vanish, then do all things vanish.
 Huang Po, c. 850

Not judging our emotions

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Times of travel or transition can give rise to a lot of emotions and they always like to give birth to thoughts about how we are doing or where we are headed in life. It is best to just hold emotions as mental events that pass through and not believe the stories that arise out of them:

Trust in the simple act of attention. Awareness includes emotions as mental objects, rather than as subjects. If you don’t know this, you tend to identify with your emotions and your emotions become yourself. You become this emotional thing that has become terribly upset because the world is not respecting you enough. Our refuge is in the deathless reality rather than the transient and unstable conditions. If you trust in awareness, then the self and the emotions about oneself, whatever they might be, can be seen in terms of what they are — not judged, not made into a problem, but just noticed: “It’s like this.”

Ajahn Sumedho, The Problem with Personality

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Rising above worries

Karl Duffy1 Comment

 

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Everyone is overridden by thoughts;
that’s why they have so much heartache and sorrow.
At times I give myself up to thought purposefully;


But when I choose, I spring up from those under its sway.

I am like a high-flying bird, and thought is a gnat:
How should a gnat overpower me?

Rumi

photo andrew bowden