Always there

Happiness is permanent. It is always there.
What comes and goes is unhappiness. 
If you identify with what comes and goes, you will be unhappy.

If you identify with what is permanent and always there, you are happiness itself.

Poonjaji, 1910 – 1997, Indian non-dualist teacher

Sunday quote: Never certain

Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you.

It is trust, not certainty

Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

Sunday Quote: All around

Zen Master Dogen wrote, ‘The Way is basically perfect and all-pervading.’ 

I’m already in it.

We are all in it; we are made of it.

Susan Moon

Emerging and disappearing

Feelings are often born from a matrix of conditions beyond your control. Just like you can’t control the weather, or or your boss’s mood, you can’t control the feelings in your body. They are just passing through, like clouds in the sky. They, too, dissipate on their own. But if you take them too seriously and start internalizing them as part of your identity, then you will resuscitate them every time you think about the past. Remember that you are neither your feelings nor the story your mind tells about you to make sense of them. You are the vast silence that knows of their emergence and their disappearance.

Haemin Sunim, The Things You can see Only when you Slow Down

Good food

If we pay attention only to the negative things in us, especially the suffering of past hurts, we are wallowing in our sorrows and not getting any positive nourishment. We can practice appropriate attention, watering the wholesome qualities in us by touching the positive things that are always available inside and around us. That is good food for our mind. Naturally, when compassion comes up, arrogance goes down. We can selectively water the good seeds and refrain from watering the negative seeds. This doesn’t mean we ignore our suffering; it just means that we allow the positive seeds that are naturally there to get attention and nourishment.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Sunday Quote: No mistakes

Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose, there are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross