Tag: heart

Being, before doing

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When you are feeling overwhelmed, you’re trying too hard. That kind of energy does not help the other person and it does not help you. You should not be too eager to help right away. There are two things, to be and to do. Dont think too much about to do – to be is first. To be peace. To be joy. And then to do joy, to do happiness – on the basis of being. Being fresh. Being peaceful. Being compassionate. This is the basic practice. It’s like a person sitting at the foot of a tree. The tree does not have to do anything, but the tree is fresh and alive. When you are like that tree, sending out waves of freshness, you help to calm down the suffering in the other person.

Thich Nhat Hahn, Be Beautiful, Be yourself

Which angle will you take this afternoon, this weekend?

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What is life but an angle of vision?    A person is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The basis for equanimity is called “wise attention”, namely,  recognizing the power of our own attention and the crucial importance of how we relate to events. Wise attention is the antidote to the delusional thinking that replaces our direct experiences with projections and interpretations. Equanimity is central to this state of non-delusion, because it does not resist the truth of what is happening. It’s spacious enough to see happiness as happiness and suffering as suffering, without judgments or attempts to control them

Sharon Salzberg, Equanimity

We are responsible for our reactions

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When your mind doesn’t stir inside, the world doesn’t arise outside.  Bodhidharma

Pain does not necessarily lead to suffering, though the two are often linked as though they were one: pain-and-suffering. If we learn to distinguish the two, a different possibility opens up, a possibility that is as liberating as it is challenging. This possibility is the freedom of becoming responsible for our mind states, no matter what the situation.  “Responsible for our mind states” – what does this mean?  It means that no one else is responsible for your thoughts and stories, for your reactions to painful stimuli. Pain may come your way, but you do not have to add to this pain the suffering of thoughts and stories about why it happened and what should or should not be happening.

Gordon Peerman, Blessed Relief: What Christians can learn from Buddhists about Suffering

Sunday Quote: Taking time

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All this hurrying soon will be over. 

Only when we slow down do we touch the holy.

Rilke

The starting point for happiness

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Contemplating the goodness within ourselves is a classical meditation, done to bring light and joy to the mind. In contemporary times this practice might be considered rather embarrassing, because so often the emphasis is on all the unfortunate things we have done, all the disturbing mistakes we have made. Yet this classical reflection is not a way of increasing conceit. It is rather a commitment to our own happiness, seeing our happiness as the basis for intimacy with all of life. It fills us with joy and love for ourselves and a great deal of self-respect.

Significantly, when we do metta practice, we begin by directing metta toward ourselves. This is the essential foundation for being able to offer genuine love to others. When we truly love ourselves, we want to take care of others, because that is what is most enriching, or nourishing, for us. When we have a genuine inner life, we are intimate with ourselves and intimate with others. The insight into our inner world allows us to connect to everything around us, so that we can see quite clearly the oneness of all that lives. We see that all beings want to be happy, and that this impulse unites us. We can recognize the rightness and beauty of our common urge towards happiness, and realize intimacy in this shared urge.

Sharon Salzberg, Facets of Metta

Give yourself a break this weekend

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It’s important to acknowledge mistakes, feel appropriate remorse, and learn from them so they don’t happen again. But most people keep beating themselves up way past the point of usefulness: they’re unfairly self-critical. Inside the mind are many sub-personalities. For example, one part of me might set the alarm clock for 6 am to get up and exercise . . . and then when it goes off, another part of me could grumble: “Who set the darn clock?” More broadly, there is a kind of inner critic and inner protector inside each of us. For most people, that inner critic is continually yammering away, looking for something, anything, to find fault with. It magnifies small failings into big ones, punishes you over and over for things long past, ignores the larger context, and doesn’t credit you for your efforts to make amends.

Therefore, you really need your inner protector to stick up for you: to put your weaknesses and misdeeds in perspective, to highlight your many good qualities surrounding your lapses, to encourage you to keep getting back on the high road even if you’ve gone down the low one, and – frankly – to tell that inner critic to Shut Up.

Rick Hanson, The Art of Self-forgiveness