As we look forward to starting another month …
To dare is to lose one’s footing temporarily;
to not dare, is to lose one’s life
Søren Kierkegaard
The Choice
Tag: Be fully present
Not adding more
Not adding to our inevitable difficulties by lamenting, resisting, feeling sorry for ourselves, or making them into the story of our lives. One of the Buddhas most useful teachings: how we speak to ourselves about our challenges reduces our suffering.
Now a well-instructed person, when touched with a feeling of pain, does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. So he feels one pain: physical, but not mental. As they are touched by that painful feeling, they are not resistant. No resistance-obsession with regard to that painful feeling consumes them.
Just as if they were to shoot a person with an arrow and, right afterward, did not shoot them with another one, so that they would feel the pain of only one arrow. In the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the well-instructed person does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. They feels one pain: physical, but not mental
Their accepting or rejecting are scattered, gone to their end, do not exist. Knowing the dustless, sorrowless state, they discern rightly, are beyond becoming, have gone to the Further Shore.
The Buddha, The Sallatha Sutta
Stay Alert
Nobody said it was easy, to stay in the fire, stay alert, and forebear.
But the alternative is to suffer what is, anyway,
but with no true or reliable relationship with it
Susan Murphy, Upside-Down Zen
Labels
Sometimes it is better, when we we feel groundless and uncertain, to resist the drive to make a situation right or wrong, and instead to trust in an underlying flow.
Once the whole is divided, the parts need names.
There are already enough names.
One must know when to stop.
Knowing when to stop averts trouble.
All things end in the Tao, like a river flowing home to the sea.
Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, 32
Teachers
A monk once asked Joshu, ‘Who is my teacher?’
Joshu said, ‘Clouds rising out of the mountains, streams entering the valley without a sound.’
The monk said, ‘I wasn’t asking about them.’
Joshu said, ‘Though they are your teachers, you don’t recognize them.‘
from Henry Shukman, One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart
Moment by moment
Tomorrow’s joy is possible only if today’s makes way for it;
…..each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.
Andre Gide
Mindfulbalance 