Tag: Be fully present

Already awake

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One of the most powerful Buddhist teachings is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will. As long as you’re wanting yourself to get better, you won’t. As long as you are oriented toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or already are. One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is the feeling that the present moment is not good enough. Instead of looking for fruition, we could just try to stay with our open heart and open mind. By entering into this kind of unconditional relationship with ourselves, we can begin to connect with the awake quality that we already have

Pema Chodron

Sunday quote: Within

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Today is the Feast of Candlemas, which echoes themes found in many traditions around this time – new life, the first budding of plants, the return of the sun – light and warmth at the halfway point between the winter and the spring solstices.

We need constant reminders of the presence of light.

We are stars wrapped in skin,

The light you are seeking has always been within.

Rumi

 

Take the Present

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Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate,
Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers
In tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes.
This could be our last winter, it could be many
More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:
Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines
And forget about hope. Time goes running, even
As we talk.

Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair.

Horace, 65 – 8 BC,  Ode 1, 11

The key is a light touch

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The mind is exactly this tree, that grass….

without thought or feeling both disappear

Ikkyu, 1394 – 1481 , Zen Buddhist monk and poet.

Saturday pause

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Many of us have been running all our lives. We have the feeling that we need to run — into the future, away from the past, out from wherever we are. In truth, we don’t need to go anywhere. We just need to sit down and look deeply to discover that the whole cosmos is right here within us.

Thich Nhat Hahn

The source of vitality

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Aristotle concluded that bliss is not about perfection. You have to deal with bad fortune sometimes. The difference is whether you approach it with nobility and a great soul. What is a great soul or ‘mega-soul?’  Souls get big from opening out beyond the limitations of human knowledge and control. Everyone is called to be a mystic of some sort, and being open to mystery and myth, the intuitive and the non-rational, to art and ritual, to nature and animals, to absurd ideas and outrageous fantasies gives the soul room to fashion a lovable and thoughtful human being. However simple your life, however ordinary and retiring, you can have a mega-soul, a vast source of vitality, and the capacity for pain and failure as well. You can be noble in your simplicity and deep and wide in your ability to contain life.

Thomas Moore