Tag: Be fully present

We use pleasant and unpleasant feelings to measure our success or failure. If we experience something pleasant, we think we’ve succeeded. If we experience an unpleasant feeling, we think we’ve failed.

When our minds cling to the nature of experience in a personalized way, we end up running around trying to prop up a sense of a satisfied happy self, or reinventing ourselves as miserable and hopeless.

The practice is to look at things from the lens of our experience and seeing their impermanent, uncertain, changing nature…. they’re arising, they’re ceasing, they’re arising, they’re ceasing.

Ajahn Pasanno , On Becoming and Stopping

There are years that ask questions,

and years that answer them

 Zora Neale Hurston, 1891–1960, American novelist, short-story writer and folklorist, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Especially at this time of year…

There are two kinds of thoughts that dominate almost all humans: thoughts revolving around our own history and thoughts revolving around our own future …

Try putting them down, just for a bit.

See if you can greet some part of life more immediately, here and now.

Björn Natthiko Lindeblad. I May Be Wrong: And Other Wisdoms From Life as a Forest Monk

Nollaig Shona Daoibh! [Happy Christmas to you all ]

All grace comes precisely from nowhere – from silence and emptiness = which is what makes it grace. It is both you, and yet so much greater than you at the same time, which is probably why believers chose both up-rushing fountains and down-rushing doves as metaphors for this universal experience. Sometimes it is an uprush and sometimes it is a down-rush, but it is always from a silence that is larger than you, surrounds you, and names the deeper truth of the full moment that is you.

The word “prayer” has been so consistently trivialized to refer to something you do, instead of something that is done to you, with you, in you, and as you.

Then, like Mary, you are ready to give birth. You are ready for Christmas.

Richard Rohr