How can you follow the course of your life
if you do not let it flow
Lao Tzu quoted in Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Going with the current
Tag: impermanence
Be patient
In Tibetan Buddhism there’s a set of teachings for cultivating compassion called mind training, or lojong. One of the lojong teachings is, “Whichever of the two occurs, be patient.” This means if a painful situation occurs, be patient, and if a pleasant situation occurs, be patient.
This is an interesting point. Usually, we jump all the time; whether it’s pain or pleasure, we want resolution. So if we’re happy and something is great, we could also be patient then, and not fill up the space, going a million miles an hour —impulse shopping, impulse talking, impulse acting out.
Pema Chodron
Our narrative
Everyone gets sick sometimes,
feels bad sometimes.
This is not a hindrance to Dhamma practice.
The hindrance is to take it personally.
Ajahn Sucitto
Sunday Quote: Always changing
This dewdrop world –
Is a dewdrop world,
And yet, and yet
Kobayashi Issa, 1763 – 1828, Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest, after the death of his daughter
Regrets
Most people think they will regret foolish actions more than foolish inactions. But studies show that nine out of ten people are wrong. Indeed, in the long run, people of every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did.
Dan Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness
Underneath the worry
In Zen meditation, we learn how to breathe with phrases, inquire of them, take them beyond conventional styles of understanding. We allow thought to arise, but not grasping thought, not being caught up in thought, not driving thought with our fear, desire, our smallness, as we usually do. So that instead of interpreting or explaining the phrases, trying to gain mastery over them, we allow ourselves to feel the phrases deeply, below the level of our conceptual mind.
In one story, Wu is sweeping the ground and Yan says, “Too busy!”
Wu replies, “You should know there’s one who’s not busy.”
This story is telling us that when we think we are busy, that’s just on the surface. The stress we complain about is conceptual and superficial. We can run around and do plenty of things, but when we know who we are and what is actually going on, we don’t need to be stressed out about anything.
Norman Fischer, Phrases and Spaces
Mindfulbalance 