Most of our suffering comes from having a fixed view of how life, or this day, should go…
For things to reveal themselves to us
we need to be ready to abandon our views about them
Thich Nhat Hahn
A soft gaze
Tag: heart
Earth stuff and star stuff
The practice of cultivating a loving and kind attitude towards ourselves and others, is not a self-improvement technique but an act of quiet daring. As we let down our habitual guard, as we soften and relax, allowing ourselves to loosen the grip of the thoughts and fears that haunt us, we remember the life is here, quietly offering itself to us in this very moment. We remember that we inhabit bodies that come to us from ancestors who endured and overcame much. We remember our deep connection to the earth and also to the stars. We are made of earth stuff and star stuff.
Tracy Cochran
Don’t keep a chair
There will always be times when you feel discouraged.
I too, have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it.
I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Sunday Quote: Cage
We spend much of our time in a cage created by our own fear of discomfort.
Pema Chödrön
Fat with Blessing
A small green island where one white cow lives alone,
a meadow of an island.
The cow grazes till nightfall, full and fat,
but during the night she panics
and grows thin as a single hair. “What shall I eat
tomorrow? There’s nothing left!”
By dawn, the grass has grown up again, waist-high.
The cow starts eating and by dark the meadow is clipped short.
She’s full of strength and energy, but she panics
in the dark as before, and grows abnormally thin overnight.
The cow does this over and over, and this is all she does.
She never thinks, “This meadow has never failed
to grow back. Why should I be afraid every night that it won’t?”
The cow is the soul. The island field is this world where
that grows lean with fear and fat with blessing.
Lean or fat.
White cow, don’t make yourself miserable
with what is to come, or not to come.
Rumi
Not who we are
The transformation of fear does not mean that we no longer have fearful responses. It means that we no longer believe that those responses are who we are. This is what practice is about: learning to stop believing that our deep-seated reactivity is who we are. Who we really are is much bigger than any of our fear-based conditioned responses. When we can really experience fear, we can see through this false identification, perhaps even glimpsing a vaster sense of Being.
Ezra Bayda, Being Zen
Mindfulbalance 