Tag: Be fully present

Stopping

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When we sit in meditation, we cease some of the restless moving of the mind, even if briefly. These periods of rest and ease switch off the grasping mind which always wants more. We stop, and realize that happiness is already available.

In the Buddha’s time there lived a killer called Angulimala… When Angulimala had one last victim to kill, he saw the Buddha coming down the road. Angulimala ran toward the Buddha with his sword, with the intent to kill his last victim and complete his task. The Buddha was walking slowly and it seemed Angulimala would have no difficulty in finishing him off, but the young man found that he could not catch up to the master, even though the Buddha appeared to not be moving at all. Angulimala finally called out to the Buddha in frustration, “Stop!”. The Buddha replied “Angulimala I have already stopped for the sake of all beings. It is you who has not stopped”

Angulimala was so moved that he abandoned his ways and became a monk…Soon he became an arhat, a liberated person, and entered nirvana.

Guo Gu, Silent Illumination

Not seeing

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Lent begins today in the Christian tradition – a 40 day period of simplification in order to notice what is important.

There is a basket of fresh bread on your head, yet you go door to door asking for crusts. Knock on the inner door, no other.
Sloshing knee-deep in fresh riverwater,
yet you keep asking for other people’s waterbags.
Water is everywhere around you, but you see
only the barriers that keep you from water.
The horse is beneath the rider’s thighs,
and still you ask, “Where’s my horse?”
                                                        Right there, under you!
“Yes, this is a horse, but where’s the horse?”
                                                        Can’t you see it?
“Yes, I can see, but whoever saw such a horse?”
Mad with thirst, you can’t drink from the stream running close by your face. You are like a pearl on the deep bottom wondering inside the shell,

Where’s the ocean? Those mental questioning form the barrier. Stay bewildered inside God, and only that.
When you are with everyone but me, you’re with no one.
When you are with no one but me, you’re with everyone.
Instead of being so bound up with everyone, be everyone.
When you become that many, you’re nothing. Empty. 

Rumi, in Coleman Barks, Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

The basic dynamic

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When practicing mindfulness, even directed toward something as ordinary as breathing, we enhance the part of the mind that is aware of the way things are, while diminishing the part that is stressed because things are not the way we want them to be.

Andrew Olendzki, What’s in a Word? Sati

Plenty of Practice

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Even on the calmest, most uneventful day we get many opportunities to see the clash between what we want and the way it really is.

Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

Sunday Quote: Free

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Never pray to be a better slave when God is trying to get you out of your situation

Shannon L. Alder

Humble places

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Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

Camille Pissarro, 1830 – 1903, Danish-French Impressionist/ Neo-Impressionist painter