When you forget about the good and the non-good, the worldly life and the spiritual life, and all other ideas from teachings, and permit no thoughts relating to them to arise, and you abandon body and mind — then there is complete freedom. When the mind is like wood or stone, there is nothing to be discriminated.
Pai-chang Huai-hai, Chinese Zen Master 720 – 814
photo pieter lanser
To be nobody-but-yourself
— in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else —
means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
e.e. cummings, A Poet’s Advice
photo rennett stowe
There is a simple question that helps me to practice the second step of gratitude: “What’s my opportunity here?” You will find that most of the time, the opportunity that a given moment offers you is an opportunity to enjoy – to enjoy sounds, smells, tastes, texture, colors, and, with still deeper joy, friendliness, kindness, patience, faithfulness, honesty, and all those gifts that soften the soil of our heart like warm spring rain. The more we practice awareness of the countless opportunities to simply enjoy, the easier it becomes to recognize difficult or painful experiences as opportunities, as gifts.
David Steindl-Rast, Awake, Aware and Alert
photo alan murray-rust
More on thoughts as constructive or destructive, this time from an early Christian monk who was remarkable for his insights into processes of the mind or heart. His encouragement to be watchful of what thoughts we dwell on and resist negative, self-critical, ones, is very similar to one of the descriptions found in ancient texts of mindfulness as a gatekeeper, and to exercises used in modern Cognitive Behavioural Therapy:
Be the guardian of your own heart and do not let any thought pass through without checking them! Ask each one of them: “Are you from our side or from that of those against us?“. If they come from your own house, they will fill you full of peace, but if they come from your enemy they will stir up anger and agitate your emotions.
Evagrius Pontius, 345 – 399.
photo guus van der valk
If you ask someone who is swimming in water, ‘What is water like?’, then they simply bring attention to it and say, ‘Well, it feels like this. It’s this way.’ Then you ask, ‘How is it exactly? Is it wet or cold or warm or hot…?’ All of these words can describe it. Water can be cold, warm, hot, pleasant, unpleasant… But it’s just like this. The realm we’re swimming in for a lifetime is this way! It feels like this! You feel it! Sometimes it’s pleasant. Sometimes it’s unpleasant. Most of the time it’s neither pleasant nor unpleasant. But always it’s just this way. Things come and go and change, and there’s nothing that you can depend on as being totally stable. [It’s] all energy and change and movement; all flux and flow.
Now we’re not judging it; we’re not saying it’s good or it’s bad, or you should like it, or you shouldn’t; we’re just bringing attention to it – like the water.
Ajahn Sumedho
Life dances and you have to dance with it, whether it is taking you on a wonderful ride or is stepping on your toes. This is the necessary price and transcendent gift of being incarnate; alive in a body. Each moment is a fresh moment in the dance, and if you are lost in clinging to the past or clinging to your fears of the future, you are not present for the dance.
Philip Moffitt
photo cindy funk
