Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.
How do you know this is the experience you need?
Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.
Eckhart Tolle
Whatever experience
Tag: Be fully present
A flexible identity
In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity.
It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure who we are, or who anyone else is, either.
Pema Chodron
What do you want
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved,
to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Raymond Carver, written during his last, terminal, illness
The five remembrances
Reminders to live fully, with joy and a deep appreciation of this precious human life.
The Buddha recommends that we recite the “Five Remembrances” every day:
1. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
2. I am of the nature to have ill-health. There is no way to escape having ill-health.
3. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
5. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.
Thich Nhat Hahn
In this time of change
In a time of drastic change one can be too preoccupied with what is ending or too obsessed with what seems to be beginning. In either case one loses touch with the present and with its obscure but dynamic possibilities. You do not need to know what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
In such an event, courage is the authentic form taken by love.
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
Round and round
Mindfulness is paying attention to real time reality. This can seem like such a small thing – and it is. It is a state of attention that is as natural and soft and wordless as our peripheral vision. Yet mindfulness also means to remember… what? Mindfulness pulls us back to a greater living reality, reminding us that life is more than our own repetitive thoughts or fears or desires. Rooted in the present tense world of the body rather than the thoughts, the strangely named mindfulness (bodyfulness? Lifefulness?) delivers us from the hellish centrifugal force of our own egos.
Tracey Cochran, The Open Door
Mindfulbalance 