Tag: Be fully present

Competely in the moment

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File:Casual tea set@Japan.jpg

If you can pour a cup of tea right,

you can do anything

Gurdjieff

photo saitowitz

What seems solid

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hook head

It is in running away from our “monsters” that we make them seem so solid. Whatever we resist exerts a strong hold on us: in solidifying it, we empower it to stay in our mind and our life. But when we cultivate the willingness to be with life just as it is, our relationship to what we’ve avoided starts to change. Once we see through the solidity of our resistance, our lives become more fluid and workable. We’re able to move beyond where we were once stuck. Even if we don’t like our life as it is, we don’t need to wage war against it. We can start meeting our resistance squarely by noticing all of the ways in which we avoid the present moment, the ways in which we avoid practice, the ways in which we resist what is. Understanding the depth of our resistance is of major importance in furthering our practice.

Ezra Bayda, Breaking Through

Familiar stories

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photo

We can have a lot of stories about how our lives are heading, or what our strengths and weaknesses are, or why things are not going as the should go…

One of the most beautifully disturbing questions we can ask, is whether a given story we tell about our lives is actually true, and whether the opinions we go over every day have any foundation or are things we repeat to ourselves simply so that we will continue to play the game.  It can be quite disorientating to find that a story we have relied on is not only not true – it never was true…In fact, the continued retelling of it simply imprisons us. We are used to the prison,  however, we have indeed fitted cushions and armchairs and made it comfortable and have locked the door from the inside.

David Whyte, Letter from the House, Winter 2012

Sunday Quote: Spontaneity

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wild flowers 33

We need the tonic of wildness

Thoreau

Leaning too far forward

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File:Leaning Trees - geograph.org.uk - 707031.jpg

Don’t prolong the past,

don’t invite the future,

don’t be deceived by appearances,

just dwell in present awareness.

Patrul Rinpoche

photo ian paterson

Being just in the now and not in time

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Vintage looking Clock Sign of Möbel Hansson in the Old Town in Stockholm Sweden (6116259031).jpg

I was at an event yesterday where a speaker said that a certain tribe in the Amazon have no concept of time, no words for “week” or “month”. Strange, since we allow these ideas exert such pressure on us. They, on the contrary, do not think of time as a “thing”, or understand the idea of “I haven’t got the time”, racing against the clock to get something completed.  This allows them to relate differently to the moment; they are not persecuted by an idea of a perfect moment, or relate to it just through the thinking faculty; they are grounded in the now, no matter how it is:

If your relationship to the present moment is not right,

nothing can ever be right in the future,

because when the future comes,

it’s the present moment.

Eckhart Tolle

photo arjan richter