Give up defining yourself – to yourself or to others.
You won’t die. You will come to life. And don’t be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it’s their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don’t be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
Liberation ….is a process of mentally, emotionally, stepping back from any state and seeing it just as a state, without reactions and attitudes.
This simple skill, which most of us can do from time to time, is what we develop in … practice.
Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma
This mind of ours is naturally peaceful. It’s still and calm like a leaf that is not being blown about by the wind…
Why the mind doesn’t feel peaceful right now is because it gets lost in its own moods. There’s nothing to mind itself. It simply abides in its natural state, that’s all. That sometimes the mind feels peaceful and other times not peaceful is because it has been tricked by moods. The untrained mind lacks wisdom. Moods come and trick it into feeling pleasure one minute and suffering the next. Happiness then sadness. But the natural state of a person’s mind isn’t one of happiness or sadness. This experience of happiness and sadness is not the actual mind itself, but just these moods which have tricked it. The mind gets lost, carried away by these moods with no idea what’s happening. It still isn’t very clever. And we go on thinking that it’s our mind which is suffering or our mind which is happy, when actually it’s just lost in its various moods.
Ajahn Chah, Training this Mind
The weekend can allow us get out into nature and into its pace, learning its balance and wisdom. It is a useful corrective to the speed which modern society – and workplaces – consider necessary, and to the importance which it places on passing trends:
The internal activity of analysis, speculation, memory, investigation, cross-referencing, decision-making, and self-evaluation can amount to a volume of overwhelming proportions. Then the experience of overload develops into one of exhaustion, or of a pressure in our lives that diminishes peace and joy… This is the loss of balance that we can rightly experience as being flooded.
It isn’t the world per se, nor is it that we are chronically unbalanced;
it’s just that the right relationship hasn’t been struck.
Ajahn Sucitto, Parami
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure
with a liberal allowance of time.
Henry David Thoreau
photo of the Mourne mountains, County Down by ardfern
What do Sad people have in
Common?
It seems
They have all built a shrine
To the past
And often go there
And do a strange wail and
Worship.
What is the beginning of
Happiness?
It is to stop being
so religious
Like that.
Hafiz
Photo: Fahan, Co Donegal, Ireland by Andreas Borchert
