Tag: balance

Being awake

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Bumblebee

There’s not a good way to come into meditation or a bad way to come into meditation. It might feel preferable to show up feeling calm and spacious, but really meditation is about being awake and present to whatever is going on. You can’t critique your meditation in terms of good and bad. The only thing you can measure your meditation against is the question: “Was I present or not?” And even then, to say to yourself that you weren’t present is a result of the fact that you’ve been meditating and you recognized that fact. There’s some sense of awareness about what is actually happening.

Pema Chodron, How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with your mind

Our restless heart

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tree

I love you, gentlest of Ways,
who ripened us as we wrestled with you.

you, the great homesickness we could never shake off,
you, the forest that always surrounded us,

you, the song we sang in every silence,
you dark net threading through us,

on the day you made us you created yourself,
and we grew sturdy in your sunlight…

let your hand rest on the rim of heaven now and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours,  translation anita barrows and joanna macy

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