That’s basically the instruction that Dzigar Kongtrul gave me. And now I pass it on to you. Instead of blaming our discomfort on outer circumstances or on our own weakness, we can choose to stay present and awake to our experience, not rejecting it, not grasping it, not buying the stories that we relentlessly tell ourselves. This is priceless advice that addresses the true cause of suffering – yours, mine and that of all living beings.
Pema Chodron, Taking The Leap
Emptiness is not something sacred in which to believe.
It is an emptying: a letting go of the fixations and compulsions that lock one into a tight cell of self that seems to exist in detached isolation from the turbulent flux of life.
Stephen Batchelor
Ajahn Buddhadasa, a colleague of Ajahn Chah, made a point of directing his students to look for nirvana in the simplest ways, in everyday moments. “Nirvana,” he would say, “is the coolness of letting go, the inherent delight of experience when there is no grasping or resistance to life. It is always available. Anyone can see that if grasping and aversion were with us day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand them? Instead we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness and ease…In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us. We have periods of rest making us refreshed and well. Why don’t we feel thankful for this everyday nirvana?”
Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart, Buddhist Psychology for the West.
The heart is just the heart; thoughts and feelings are just thoughts and feelings. Let things be just as they are! Let form be just form, let sound be just sound, let thought be just thought….If we think and feel in this way, then there is detachment and separateness. Our thoughts and feelings will be on one side and our heart will be on the other. Just like oil and water – they are in the same bottle but they are separate.
Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart
Praise and blame,
gain and loss,
fame and disrepute,
pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind.
To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the midst of them all.
The Buddha
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn;
that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning;
that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon,
and under every deep a lower deep opens.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles
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