Tag: impermanence

Continual practice

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In Japan, cleaning is called “Soji” and valued as a way to cultivate our minds. Buddhist monks in a monastery put more time into practicing Soji than into practicing Zen meditation. A monk’s day begins with cleaning. We sweep the temple grounds and polish the temple building

One important thing Soji practice tells us is that we never complete cleaning. Just as leaves begin to fall after you sweep, desires begin to accumulate right after you refresh your mind. We continue cleaning the gloom in our hearts, knowing that we will never end it.

Shoukei Matsumoto, 1979 -,  author of A Monk’s Guide to a Clean House and Mind

Sunday Quote: the root cause

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I think we’re miserable partly because we have only one god, and that’s economics.

James Hillman, 1926 – 2011, American Jungian psychologist

Recognize what you have

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Focus on the positive things you have, rather than the size of the task ahead of you.

Jesus said to his disciples, “How many loaves have you? Mark 6:38

Why worry about the loaves and fishes?

If you say the right words, the wine expands.

If you say them with love and the felt ferocity of that love and the felt necessity of that love, the fish explode into many.

Imagine him, speaking, and don’t worry about what is reality, or what is plain, or what is mysterious.

If you were there, it was all those things.

If you can imagine it, it is all those things.

Eat, drink, be happy. Accept the miracle.

Accept, too, each spoken word spoken with love.

Mary Oliver, Logos

Missing most of life

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Once at a workshop, the instruction was to walk mindfully over to the lunchtime food across the room. In that short walk across the room, I noticed how automatically I get ahead of myself — how I lose track of these miraculous feet on the ground and miss the space in between. And I’m beginning to suspect that most of life is “in between“.

 David Rynick, This Truth Never fails: A Zen memoir in Four Seasons

To give room

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The pattern of things….is there from the start. Who you are is there from the beginning. Your task in life is to discern that pattern, listen for it, and give room for it to emerge. More commonly, though, we are all too busy trying to make things happen – to make ourselves happen. We may push and shove through most of a lifetime before realizing that another voice is whispering beneath the fret of our efforts and strategies.

Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Change Your Life

Arise and pass away

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Can apply to all moods and emotions.

Anger is no more mine

than is the breeze on my skin

or the sound of a dog barking across the street.

Ajahn Amaro