During a long retreat, I had what seemed to me the earthshaking revelation that we cannot be in the present and run our story lines at the same time! It sounds pretty obvious, I know, but when you discover something like this for yourself, it changes you.
Pema Chodron, When Things fall Apart
You will only grab hold of concepts if you follow the storyline.
Sayadaw U Tejaniya
Many people believe that emptiness is a lifeless void of nothingness that leads to emotional or mental paralysis.
However, emptiness, when timed correctly in the healing process, leads to freedom…
It serves as the space of transition…
Donald Epstein, The 12 Stages of Healing
Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . .and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt. Exodus 12: 7 & 13They thought they were safe
that spring night; when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.
But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.
Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.
Lynn Ungar, Passover
What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.
David Whyte, What to Remember when Waking
Everything appears – in the present moment, right now. Things happen, right now, not in past or present. So practice should be the practice of “right now.” When we, you know, catch things, how you catch it? You cannot…..you cannot catch past or future. You can catch just the present moment, right now. If you want to catch someone, you should catch him right now, not past or not in future. So if you want to practice, you should practice right now. But because we are always, you know, involved in thinking mind, and because we try to understand teaching, you know, with seeking mind, in term of present or past or now or later, or always….. The wave and water, right now, it is – wave is water, water is wave. But if you think about it, you have the idea of water and idea of wave because you saw it, because you saw the wave and you have idea of water. And you may think: “But that is water. Water is something like this, you know.” But right now when you see waves on the water, wave is water and water is wave, right now, when you don’t think.
From a transcript of Suzuki Roshi talk, 1969, Emptiness is Form
We’ve all experienced how unsettling and uncertain life can be and how easily we can be knocked off center at any moment. When we’re not in balance, we can become defined by whatever is happening and get caught in what I call “reactive mind.” But through the skillful application of mindfulness we can learn to self-soothe whenever life delivers us a blow and soon regain our balance. When we lack the ability to self-soothe, we resort to using less skillful strategies to deal with difficulty such as escaping into fantasy, or overindulging in drugs, alcohol, or food, which usually prolongs our suffering. Self-soothing begins with softening into your experience and then applying mindfulness to recognize that “this moment is like this.” From within the spaciousness that this softening creates, you can start to investigate the experience ….What insights can you apply to this difficult situation? For instance, you might reflect on the impersonal nature of life. Although you are having a personal experience, it is just causes and conditions that are creating this experience. This too is going to change because everything changes. Life is hard; therefore, it’s not a mistake that your life is hard in this moment. This insight alone can be a source of great comfort.
Philipp Moffitt
Mindfulbalance 