Tag: balance

Another passing thing

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Looking Outside

Clinging is weakened by the activity of meditation. For example, we sit quietly and experience the flow of feeling, the dependent and changing experience of our bodily form, and all the “I should do it” programs twitching in the mind. And through meditating we can unhook the reactions and reflex-activities by focusing on their changeability. This practice, although based on ethics and sense-restraint, doesn’t attempt to affect the topics that the mind is carrying in its perceptions and volitions….so that whatever our impulse or perception is, it’s just seen as another passing thing.

Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

 

The only concern

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walks water

Above all, don’t wish to become a future Buddha;
Your only concern should be,
As thought follows thought,
To avoid clinging to any of them

Dogen

Miracle is all around us

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Noticing the extraordinary in the ordinary

Faith does not spring out of nothing.
It comes with the discovery of the holy dimension of our existence.
Suddenly we become aware that our lips touch the veil
That hangs before the Holy of Holies.
Our faith is lit up for a time with the light from behind the veil.
Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy.
This is how close we are to the holy.
When we open ourselves up to the possibility
That God can be there in any moment,
Miracle is all around us.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Suddenly we become Aware

The door

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door 14

Consciously or unconsciously, we avoid facing things as they are in themselves

and so we want God to open a door for us which is beyond…

(but) to find life’s purpose we must go through the door of ourselves

Jiddu Krisnamurti

Travelling too fast

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File:Brinlack - Stone wall - geograph.org.uk - 1181431.jpg

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.

John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

photo joseph Mischyshyn

Slowly

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chinese mountains

Smile,

breathe,

and go slowly. 

Thich Nhat Hanh

O snail

climb Mount Fuji

but slowly slowly

Kobayashi Issa, 1763 –  1828, Japanese Buddhist priest and poet