Stepping into a new month
The idea that we should or even can know ourselves is a tyranny.
It assumes that clarity is always preferable to mystery, that explanation is always better than wonder.
But what if not knowing is the most honest relationship we can have with ourselves?
Adam Phillips, British psychoanalytic psychotherapist and essayist, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
Way back in the ’80s, my guru asked me, “What is stress?” He had never heard of stress because he came from the Himalayas. I told him stress is the perception of threat: physical, emotional and psychological. After a while, he said, “You mean resistance to existence.” And he said, “If you don’t resist existence, you will have flow.” That’s the best advice.
Deepak Chopra in Wall Street Journal, November 2024, Deepak Chopra Doesn’t Believe You’re Too Busy to Meditate
For the awakening of the heart,
conditions are always good enough.
Ajahn Sumedho
The goal, if we can speak of a goal on the spiritual path, is not to be attained in the future.
It is the place we start from. It is within us. It is us, our essential self.
We cannot go towards it; we relax back into it
We are revealed as that
Rupert Spira
Seeing all things as equally present
is to cease seeing things
through the lens of their meaning and usefulness to myself
Noelle Oxehandler, Buddhist author
The precious tree of nondual mind
spreads throughout the universe
it bears compassion in flower and fruit,
though there is no other,
and nobody “doing good“
Tilopa, 988 – 1069, Indian tantric master and scholar, influential in the Buddhist Mahāmudrā/ Tibetian tradition
Mindfulbalance 