The Buddha’s first insight was that life is fundamentally unsatisfactory – not because life is flawed,
but because we relate to it in ways that inevitably lead to suffering.
Andrew Olendzki, Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism
The mind is clear like space
– but we clutter it with ‘shoulds.’
Put down the furniture of your opinions,
and the whole sky is available.
Joan Halifax, Being with Dying
When we stop insisting that life be other than it is, we begin to find peace. Acceptance does not mean approval, passivity, or giving up.
It means facing reality with open eyes and an open heart, letting life teach us what it will.
We mature when we stop trying to make life easy and start working with life as it is.
This is the beginning of real freedom — the freedom to love what is, even when it isn’t what we wanted.
David Richo, The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them
We reduce, concretize, or substantialize experiences or feelings which are., in their very nature, fleeting or evanescent.
In so doing, we define ourselves by our moods and by our thoughts
We do not just let ourselves be happy or sad
For instance, we must be a happy person or a sad one
This is the chronic tendency of the ignorant or deluded mind, to make “things” out of that which is no thing
Mark Epstein
Maybe the meaning of life is just to see the beauty in the ordinary.
To love the things that don’t last, because nothing does.
To stand in the rain and feel it.
To be alive in the world.
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
We often give the things that bother us more weight than they deserve, forgetting that all things arise and pass away
The great beings see with their wisdom eye
all things like reflections of forms
They do not become stuck in the mire
of so-called objects.
Arya Nagarjuna, 2nd-century Indian Buddhist philosopher, Sixty Verses of Reasoning
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