True meditation is making everything — coughing, swallowing, waving, movement and stillness, speaking and acting, good and evil, fame and shame, loss and gain, right and wrong — into one single koan.
Hakuin, Zen teacher, 1685 – 1768.
photo russavia
Tag: Be fully present
Sunday Quote: Fresh eyes
Nothing’s worth noting that is not seen with fresh eyes.
Bashō, (1644 – 1694)
Allow life to be a conversation
The conversational nature of reality means that whatever you want from life will not occur in exactly the way you’d like it to. But, also, whatever life wants from you – society wants from you, your parents want from you, your partner wants from you, your children want from you – will also not occur. And that what occurs is this third quality which is more like a meeting and a dynamic of the two, a conversation between the two. I’d like to speak about the life that can actually be conversation in its essence, where we don’t choose too early in the process and we allow things to come to fruition in a surprising, nourishing, and generous way.
David Whyte, What to Remember when Waking
No point comparing: This moment is all there is
Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic or visible, plant or animal, extinct or living. So there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or to heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known. The particulars count
Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, There you are
Experience without judgment
The more I practiced, and the more I read about the practice, I realized that meditation was not meant to purge our minds of negative emotions or thought patterns, but rather meant to help us experience them without judgment. We were to let go of our resistance to pain at the deepest level and understand that we suffer not because pain is bad, but because our mind labels it as bad.
Kenji, Looking Back: My First Year as a Meditation Practitioner
Cultivating
To establish mindfulness and full awareness in daily life relies on a skilful filtering of the input of stuff coming at us from all directions, because the sheer deluge of contact can overwhelm them: what we give attention to receives our energy and enters our hearts, and there it stimulates action and reaction. Because we consequently build up bright or dark habits, we need to be responsible about what we give attention to. Part of cultivation is therefore about turning away from input and actions that just pull the mind out into craving or aversion or distraction. …Fathoming attention then is an action that causes us to pause, and takes us into our minds and hearts more deeply.
Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma
