If we try to get rid of a problem, then we are making it into something solid, something real. That is the mistake.
Instead, if we look directly at the feeling, at its energy, we can see its true nature. The problem itself dissolves into wisdom.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche in conversation with Helen Tworkov
We do ourselves a great disservice by judging where we are in comparison to some final destination. This is one of the pains of aspiring to become something: the stage of development we are in is always seen against the imagined landscape of what we are striving for.
It helps to see ourselves as flowers. If a flower were to push itself open faster, which it can’t, it would tear. Yet we can and often do push ourselves. When we push ourselves to unfold faster or more deeply that is natural, we thwart ourselves. For nature takes time, and most of our problems of will stem from impatience.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
If time is a circle,
as the Indigenous world view presumes,
the knowledge we need is already within the circle.
Robin Wall Kimmerer 1953 – Author and Director of the Center for Native Peoples & the Environment at the State University of New York, Ancient Green
Even though at times we find daily work a challenge, life itself is the deeper reality flowing through us. Have we become too numb to notice this?
Though we strain
against the deadening grip of daily necessity, I sense there is this mystery:
All life is being lived.
Who is living it, then?
Is it the things themselves, or something waiting inside them,
like an unplanned melody in a flute?
Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?
Is it flowers interweaving their fragrances,
or streets, as they wind through time?
Rainer Maria Rilke
Stress is an alarm clock that lets you know
you’ve attached to something not true for you.
Byron Katie
All Eastern traditions agree that constant striving for a future state is the root of our unhappiness. No surprise then that the West, with its focus on achievement, has such high levels of anxiety and depression.
.Our society is very result-oriented, that’s why we are so competitive. That’s why we are always stressed, because we are always looking at something in the distance.
If you are always looking at the top of the mountain you are climbing, you cannot be aware of the grass and flowers growing at your feet.
We are always looking ahead, aren’t we? And then the actual thing, the actual living, passes us by. We are locked inside our brains, cut off from the present moment, always centered on something beyond our reach.
Tenzin Palmo, Reflections on a Mountain Lake
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