Tag: heart

….and making space for them

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One point that Ajahn Sumedho would stress regularly, is that loving things is not the same as liking them. Having kindness for ourselves or for other beings is not the same as liking everything. We often come a cropper by trying to make ourselves like everything. This is a completely wrong approach. When we taste something that’s bitter and try to force ourselves to believe it’s sweet this is just falsity, it’s just sugaring things over. It doesn’t work. It just makes the bitter even worse….We’re not trying to like everything, rather we’re recognising that everything belongs. Everything is part of nature: the bitter as well as the sweet, the beautiful as well as the ugly, the cruel as well as the kindly. The heart that recognises that fundamentally everything belongs is what I would describe as being the heart of kindness, the essence of kindness. If we get that really clear within us, and begin to train ourselves to recognise it, we realise that we can cultivate this quality of radical acceptance.

Ajahn Amaro, Radical Acceptance

Allowing things to be….

Karl Duffy1 Comment

You have to trust this simple ability that we all have to be fully present and fully awake, and begin to recognize the grasping and the ideas we have taken on about ourselves, about the world around us, about our thoughts and perceptions and feelings. The way of mindfulness is the way of recognizing conditions just as they are. We simply recognize and acknowledge their presence, without blaming them or judging them or criticizing them or praising them. We allow them to be, the positive and the negative both.

Ajahn Sumedho.

Being grounded for the future

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If we do not stand firmly in the present moment we may feel ungrounded when we look at the future. We may think that in the future we will be alone, with no place of refuge and no one to help us. Such concerns about the future bring about unease, anxiety and fear, and do not help us at all in taking care of the present moment. The best way of preparing for  the future is to take good care of the present, because we know that the present is made up of the past, then the future will be made up of the present. All we need to be responsible for is the present. Only the present is within our reach. To care for the present is to care for the future.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Our Appointment with life.

No way to get guaranteees

Karl Duffy6 Comments

We all know the top hit of the ego’s silent soundtrack — “If I do this I’ll feel better.” Seeing through our own particular version of this is part of the process of waking up. Again, the essence of this entitlement is the assumption that we can make ourselves, and life, be the way we want them to be. But this can only bring disappointment. Why? Because no matter what we do, there’s no way that we can guarantee a life that is free of problems.

Perhaps the most basic belief underlying all of our feelings of entitlement, our “if onlies,” and even our illusions, is the belief that life should please us, that life should be comfort-able. All of our resistance to life is rooted in our wanting life to be pleasing, comfortable, and safe. When life doesn’t give us what we want—the job that isn’t satisfying, the relationship that isn’t quite working, the body that ages or breaks down— we resist. Our resistance can manifest as anger, or fear, or self-pity, or depression, but whatever form it takes, it blocks our ability to experience true contentment. We see our discom­fort as the problem: yet it’s the belief that we can’t be happy if we’re uncomfortable that is much more of a problem than the discomfort itself. One of the most freeing discoveries of an awareness practice is when we realize firsthand that we can, in fact, experience equanimity even in the midst of discomfort.

Ezra Bayda, Beyond Happiness

Sunday Quote: Follow the flow

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Be content with the moment, and be willing to follow the flow;

then there will be no room for grief or joy.

Chuang-tzu

Letting go of arbitrary goals

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As long as our orientation is toward perfection or success, we will never learn about unconditional friendship with ourselves, nor will we find compassion. We will just continue to buy into our old mindsets of right and wrong, becoming more solid and closed to life. ….We practice letting go of our idea of a “goal” and letting go of our concept of “progress,” because right there, in that process of letting go, is where our hearts open and soften — over and over again.

Pema Chodron