A New Years motto….
We are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
William Blake, The Little Black Boy
Sunday Quote: This year….
Tag: impermanence
Learning
Everything that happens to you is your teacher…
the secret is to learn to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it.
Polly Berrien Berends, 1940 – 2017, Writer and sculptor
What holds you back
A monk asked Shito “How does one become free?”. Shito replied, “Who has bound you?”
That’s the question, who binds you? Don’t look outside, look into the mind, investigate the opinionated mind. Become familiar with its opinions and judgments; then you wont be so vulnerable to them. Our effort is to release the mind from its ordinary opinions and see revealed a new universe. Nothing binds us but the habituated mind.
Katherine Thanas, The Truth of This Life
Begin again
How quietly I
begin again
from this moment
looking at the
clock, I start over
so much time has
passed, and is equaled
by whatever
split-second is present
from this
moment this moment
is the first.
Wendell Berry, Be Still in Haste
Really drinking tea
When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you’re not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You’re drinking your projects, you’re drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Not identifying
From Ram Dass, who passed away just a few days ago
Now the whole idea of a meditative practice is the process of very simply extracting awareness from the identification with thought and sensation
Mindfulbalance 