The hardest thing I have learned and still struggle with
is that I don’t have to be finished
to be whole
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Tag: Be fully present
Having no place to go
Change the attitude and perspective that comes from the daily world of time and having some place to go, to one being more steady and collected in the here and now.
The time sense is important to be clear about. Notice how the future feels as a direct experience: when there’s something in the future, there’s tension. This could be either because of impatience to get to a desirable state or an achievement, or it could be worry or dread over what might go wrong. In either case you lose the open ease of being in the present. When you think of the future as a definite reality, you believe in the moods that are embedded in that sense, and in the ideas that they create. Worries start to solidify; flexibility and the capacity to deal with what arises begin to dwindle. But how real is ‘the future’? After all, we might be dead tomorrow! Isn’t it more the case that the present will unfold in line with causes and conditions ? So check the time sense; it’s caused by the moods and energies of the present. The visions and ideas are an illusion.
Take refuge in Awakening.
Direct awareness is only and always here and now; and conditions change around that sense
Ajahn Sucitto
Start again
My dear Lucilius, begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
The one who has thus prepared himself, whose daily life has been a rounded whole, is easy in his mind; but those who live for hope alone find that the immediate future always slips from their grasp.
Seneca
You can choose
What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.
So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,
and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.
Mary Oliver, from Mornings at Blackwater
In its own time
Its only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly.
That again is part of this paradox.
You cannot rip away caterpillarness.
The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.
Ram Dass
Believing our fears
Sometimes we build a reality out of our greatest fears or anticipate the worst of others, when the reality is far from what we have constructed:
Unaware that our stories are stories, we usually experience them as the world. Like fish that do not see the water they swim in, we normally do not notice the medium we dwell within. We take for granted that the world we experience is just the way things are. But our concepts and ideas about the world, like the stories they are part of, strongly affect our perception of reality. In … practice, one learns, early on and then continually, the truth of my favorite bumper sticker: “Don’t believe everything you think.”
David Loy, The World Is Made of Stories
Mindfulbalance 