The nature of things

The nature of experience itself is change and movement, and this is why so many of us find that we’re to one degree or another being knocked off balance and losing our sense of equanimity. The entire world seems to be shifting, and it seems to be happening very, very quickly. So if we’re looking for a relative stillness, if we’re looking for all of this change and movement to stop, we’re always going to be frustrated, because this kind of stillness is elusive, very hard to maintain, and it can slip away in any given moment. Instead of trying to control our minds or environments by contracting or hiding in order to find this inner stillness, we must throw our senses wide open – listening, feeling, seeing – and become very wide and vast.

When you welcome all of experience into your awareness, a certain type of stillness starts to emerge organically. 

Adyashanti

Holding plans lightly

Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
Chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
And end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
And fall in.

I should be suspicious
Of what I want.

Rumi

Sunday Quote: Complete

There is not a fragment in all nature,

for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself

John Muir

Courage

There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us:

we suffer more often in imagination than in reality

Seneca the Younger, Letters from a Stoic

A time for integration

As we leave the expansiveness of summer and settle into autumn’s rhythms and routines, we may discover a desire or longing to integrate our fresh insights. … All the spiritual traditions of the world acknowledge that wisdom comes from the accrued learnings of our experiences, and this includes those learnings we reap by following someone else’s inspired path for a time. What is at the center of your life at this time? What is your central motivation now? Whenever we have the experience of being ourselves, or of loving what we are doing, we arrive at the center of what is important for us.

Angeles Arrien

Sunday quote: No preference

Awareness is the silent and choiceless observation of what is.

Jiddu Krisnamurti