We drift in and out of knowing our aliveness. Pain, worry, fear, and loss can muffle and confuse us. But ……aliveness is not a judge in a talent show. Aliveness shows itself in response to wholeheartedness, when we can say yes to life, and work with what we’re given, and stay in relationship — to everything.
Mark Nepo, Everyone has a gift
O human, see then the human being rightly:
the human being has heaven and earth and the whole of creation in itself, and yet is a complete form,
and in it everything is already present, though hidden.
Hidlegard of Bingen
I find myself more and more teaching what seems most essential; to help people access intelligent and comfortable awareness. If this awareness becomes a steady orientation, it’s possible to live and grow in this personal world; here is a sense of safety with its fundamental goodwill. The tricky detail being that it is not personal; it’s before the personal conditions arise.
And this means that the sources of the programs and attitudes that become a person get revealed: dis-ease, restlessness and having to do something, or feeling guilty and inadequate that one isn’t doing (or in fact being) whatever it is that one should be – while not knowing what that is. Not that any of that is your fault. Essentially this dukkha (suffering) is not personal, not specific; and it isn’t resolved by doing anything other than tackling its program. It’s non-specific because its source is the pressurised space of one’s unsettled awareness. That then colours everything that the personality forms out of.
Ajahn Sucitto
Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. It’s the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid.
Pema Chödrön, The In-Between state
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge
faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov
What are we when there is no one doing anything, no one attaining anything, no place to go?
There “is” no place to go.
The whole foundation is already here in each one of us.
It is the same in all of us.
There is only one foundation, which is presence, wholeness, boundless love.
Toni Packer, The Wonder of Presence: And the Way of Meditative Inquiry
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