It is possible to live happily in the here and now.
So many conditions of happiness are available — more than enough for you to be happy right now.
You don’t have to run into the future in order to get more.
Thích Nhất Hạnh
Tag: impermanence
Where to focus
Focus not on the rudeness of others,
not on what they’ve done or left undone,
but on what you have and haven’t done
yourself.
Dhammapada, 4
What is here, is good enough
Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone should behave. But it is not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.
Ajahn Sumedho
The calm underneath
Universal Mind is like a great ocean,
its surface ruffled by waves and surges
but its depths remaining forever unmoved.
The Lankavatara Scripture, c.350 AD
A steady orientation
I find myself more and more teaching what seems most essential; to help people access intelligent and comfortable awareness. If this awareness becomes a steady orientation, it’s possible to live and grow in this personal world; here is a sense of safety with its fundamental goodwill. The tricky detail being that it is not personal; it’s before the personal conditions arise.
And this means that the sources of the programs and attitudes that become a person get revealed: dis-ease, restlessness and having to do something, or feeling guilty and inadequate that one isn’t doing (or in fact being) whatever it is that one should be – while not knowing what that is. Not that any of that is your fault. Essentially this dukkha (suffering) is not personal, not specific; and it isn’t resolved by doing anything other than tackling its program. It’s non-specific because its source is the pressurised space of one’s unsettled awareness. That then colours everything that the personality forms out of.
Ajahn Sucitto
Stay in the middle of it
Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. It’s the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid.
Pema Chödrön, The In-Between state
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