My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me: I stand before it like a tree:
But I am only one of many mouths
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.
I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because death’s note wants to climb over –
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
They stay here trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The strongest love
is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.
Paul Coelho, Eleven Minutes
See what is. Acknowledge it without judging it as right or wrong. See it clearly without judgment and let it go. Come back to the present moment. From now until the moment of your death, you could do this. As a way of becoming more compassionate, as way of becoming less dogmatic, prejudiced, determined to have your own way, absolutely sure that you’re right and the other person is wrong, as a way to develop a sense of humor, to lighten it up, open it up, you could do this.
Pema Chodron
When we start to develop mindfulness, we are able to extend the sense of our domain beyond the seeming limitations of our body, of our immediate space. Try to understand that for most of human history, we have lived in larger spaces, like the wide valleys that occupy great physical space. We have the capacity to hear, see, smell, and taste and to know intuitively. We lived as communities. And it has been only a very short time that we have cut ourselves off from that, that we have lived in little separate boxes and have a very narrow sense of our mission and ourselves. We all still long for that connection. We all still yearn to have that more expansive sense of belonging and anchoring, spaciousness and connectedness. It is not that difficult to create. In meditation we create a sacred space, and the longer we abide in it, the more those old powerful urges and natural states of being emerge in us. And we begin to understand the nature of things and of change on a refined and profound level.
Steven Smith, Wise Navigating Through Change
By not stopping our thoughts and feelings in meditation, we are paving the way for gentle ways of being with our experience. When thoughts are intentionally cut off, that is often an act of harming. If it is done aggressively, even with a miniscule amount of force, it supports and furthers the tendency to get rid of thoughts rather than the tendency to get to know them. Our ability to get to know our thoughts and feelings depends on our ability not to get rid of them. Holding our experience gently, thoughts and feelings come and go in their own time.
Jason Siff, Unlearning Meditation
The best way to ‘get somewhere,’ to make progress in meditation — and that’s a dangerous way to think about it — is to just begin to pay attention, moment to moment, with less judgment.
Jon Kabat Zinn
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