Become aware of impatience as it arises during the day. Be aware of the signals in the body (tapping fingers) and the talk in the mind (“Hurry up!”) that accompany impatience. Ask yourself, “Why am I in a rush? What do I want to rush ahead to get to?” See what answers arise.
Jan Chozen Bays, How to train a Wild Elephant
photo david pickersgill
It’s in the abstract, the assumed, the possible and ‘what others think’ that the mind holds its phobias – as life messages of abandonment or inadequacy … Those qualities aren’t there in specific direct experience: there’s painful and pleasant moments, but there are no life messages. However our daily world is commonly held in terms of non-specific generalizations, like its ‘another Monday,’ or, ‘a typical man’, or ,‘I dread meeting Janice, she’s always like this,’ or ‘I’m hopeless.’ In fact…. any sense of a lasting entity or state of being is an act of generalization. It’s a useful convention, but one that allows the mind’s neuroses and corruptions to be projected onto the here and now.
Ajahn Sucitto, The Low Point
How far I have to go to find you
in whom I have already arrived
Thomas Merton
photo mtaylor848
Life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.
It is the opening of eyes long closed.
Davids Whyte, The Opening of Eyes
Photo of Lake Leman from Nyon by Alexandra Lee
When we use the term “basic goodness”,
we are talking about our inherent completeness.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
Joy is the meeting place of deep intentionality and self forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us .. with what formally seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection: the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us.
To allow our selves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious, worried self felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a well loved familiar face – I was here and you were here and together we made a world.
David Whyte , Consolations : The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
