Tranquil, undisturbed, unified.: a nice plan for this day
My body was tranquil and undisturbed, my mind concentrated and unified. The Buddha MN 4.22 (i 21)
In the body, tranquillity is like a deep, clear lake with a wide, still surface.
In the mind, it’s like the soft, quiet, fresh air over the lake at dawn.
Gil Fronsal, Tranquility
Can you remember who you were,
before the world told you who you should be?
Charles Bukowski, 1920 – 1994, American poet, novelist, and short story writer.
A new month…
The angels, the furies
Are never far away
While we dance, we dance,
Trying to keep a balance
To be perfectly human
(Not perfect, never perfect,
Never an end to growth and peril),
Able to bless and forgive
Ourselves.
This is what is asked of us.
May Sarton, The Angels and the Furies
To meditate is often to move through a land without paths.
In the room where the philosopher is meditating there is less light, so you have to open your eyes wider. The same is true inside ourselves – There is less that is obvious or reassuring, so we must open our mind’s eye much wider…
Mindfulness …means stopping to make contact with the ever-shifting experience that we are having at the time, and to observe the nature of our relationship to that experience, the nature of our presence at that moment.
from Christophe Andre’s lovely book, Mindfulness: 25 Ways to Live in the Moment through Art
If we are honest, many of us consider ourselves to be rather lazy, still haunted by those school reports that said “must try harder!” So it might surprise you if I suggest that much of what we do comes unstuck not because we don’t try hard enough, but because we try too hard, or at least try too hard in the wrong sort of way. We aim too high, too quickly, being prematurely concerned with correctness and results at the expense of practice and process.
Where does this perfectionist task-master come from? I suspect it is the highly toxic combination of a lack of confidence and a subtle sense of unworthiness. So instead of wholeheartedly embracing things, as is our birthright, we snatch at life in a sort of smash-and-grab raid before those in authority deem us imposters and ask us to leave, preferably by the back door
Manjusvara, 1953 – 2011 English-born Buddhist writer
If you look for the Buddha outside of your own mind,
the Buddha becomes the devil
Dogen, 1200 – 1253, Buddhist monk, founder of the Soto school of Zen.
Mindfulbalance 