When we enter the present moment deeply, our regrets and sorrows disappear, and we discover life with all its wonders. Breathing in, we say to ourselves, “I have arrived.” Breathing out, we say,”I am home.” When we do this, we overcome dispersion and dwell peacefully in the present moment, which is the only moment for us to be alive.
Thich Nhat Hahn, Walking Meditation
When we come face to face with the fear and pain in our psyche, we stand at the gateway to tremendous renewal and freedom. Our deepest nature is awareness, and when we fully inhabit that, we love freely and are whole… When we stop fighting the energy that has been bound in fear, it naturally releases into the boundless sea of awareness. The more we awaken from the grip of fear, the more radiant and free becomes the heart.
Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance
Your way of explaining events to yourself determines how helpless you can become, or how energized, when you encounter the everyday setbacks as well as momentous defeats.
Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism
At any given moment, you can choose to follow the chain of thoughts, emotions, and sensations that reinforce a perception of yourself as vulnerable and limited — or you can remember that you true nature is pure, unconditioned, and incapable of being harmed.
If you’re determined to think of yourself as limited, fearful, vulnerable, or scarred by past experience, know only that you have chosen to do so.
The opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
We have a tendency sometimes to put our lives on hold or believe that conditions will somehow be different in the future and then we will start to put our plans into action. Or maybe we find ourselves looking for something to come from outside or waiting on someone else’s plans. In this way, we risk missing out on opportunities which already present themselves or on what was right in front of our noses all the time, and which we do not take for fear of making a mistake or because we are waiting for some “perfect” moment.
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.
Thoreau
While giving a talk at an All Day Retreat on Saturday I came across a familiar concern. When encouraging participants to be “at home” in the moment and widen this to being at ease in their lives as they actually are, one person wondered whether this meant we will never improve. It is true that some people may use acceptance as an excuse for passivity or to mask an already existent depression. However, for most people the practice is to go against the deeply-conditioned habit of judging oneself and trying to “fix” one’s life – normally in response to the internalized early demands of parents or from the exigencies of today’s continually comparing society – and see if they can relax in their history and their personality as it is. Practically, this means noticing the way the mind likes to compare our life as it is with better lives and how it finds it hard to believe that where it is at this moment is enough. In this poem, May Sexton seems to try this. She decides, finally, to become herself and stop wearing the faces which others demand of her. She has the courage to stand still and be in her life as it is.
Now I become myself. It’s taken Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there, Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—”
(What? Before you reach the morning? Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here, Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant. As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent, Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give, Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran, Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
