We are not our thoughts. Thoughts come and thoughts go.
Unaccompanied thoughts pass quickly.
Thoughts that are thought about become desires.
Desires that are thought about become passions.
Margaret Mary Funk, Thoughts Matter
Tag: impermanence
Holding on to things lightly
Nothing that is can pause or stay;
The moon will wax, the moon will wane,
The mist and cloud will turn to rain,
The rain to mist and cloud again,
Tomorrow be today.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Being spacious
Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.
Sogyal Rinpoche
Trying to make things permanent
When we sit in meditation, we practice observing our thoughts, emotions, and sensations as they arise and fall away, while we rest on the breath or on a wider calm. The key word here is practice. It is not always easy, but we work at paying attention to our mental events, not hooking into them, simply allowing them and letting them be. We quickly learn that emotions and their associated thoughts change as frequently as the weather in Ireland. We open the mind up to more possibilities than what can be easily predicted, or our fixed views of persons. This helps us develop a real understanding of the changing ups and downs of life, leading to the development of equanimity towards the times when things or people are not as reliable as we thought they were. The word equanimity comes from Latin aequus “even” and animus ”mind, soul”. Enjoying life and reducing stress is related to a mind which is even, not having a preference for one thing or another, not holding on to something good or something bad.
Everything we gain is subject to loss. Although this is as true as the sky is blue, we keep trying to make gain permanent in order to try to bring about happiness for “me.” We think, “If only So-and-So would love me, I would be happy,“ “If only things would change, I would be happy,” “If only things would stay the way they are, I would always be happy,” and it only leads to heartache. This kind of wanting involves a lot of hope and fear, all based on denial of a simple truth: all the pleasure the world can offer eventually turns to pain. Trying to hold onto pleasure only causes more pain.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Easy Come Easy Go
Space for the conditions of life
To free ourselves from our neurotic ego is ultimately to accept the conditions of existence and to see ourselves not as victims or opponents of the givens of reality, but as adults who face up to them honestly. These givens include the following: things change and end; life is not always fair; we pay for growth with suffering; things do not always go according to plan; people are not always loyal or loving.
Accepting the conditions of existence means first of all admitting our vulnerability to them. When we realize that the givens of life – no matter how ferocious – are not penalties, but ingredients of depth, lovability and character, we can let go of the belief that we are immune (or need to be). “That can’t happen to me” or “How dare they do that to me” changes to “Anything human can happen to me and I will do my best to handle it”. The strength to handle challenges, in fact, is directly proportional to how much we let go of entitlement.
David Richo, How to be an Adult in Relationships
Noticing the space around
Most of our suffering comes from habitual thinking. If we try to stop it out of aversion to thinking, we can’t; we just go on and on and on. So the important thing is not to get rid of thought, but to understand it. And we do this by concentrating on the space in the mind, rather than on the thought.
Our minds tend to get caught up with thoughts of attraction or aversion to objects, but the space around those thoughts is not attractive or repulsive. The space around an attractive thought and a repulsive thought is not different, is it? Concentrating on the space between thoughts, we become less caught up in our preferences concerning the thoughts. So if you find that an obsessive thought of guilt, self-pity, or passion keeps coming up, then work with it in this way — deliberately think it, really bring it up as a conscious state, and notice the space around it. This way, we begin to have a perspective on the impermanent nature of thinking.
Ajahn Sumedho
Mindfulbalance 