Relax back

The goal, if we can speak of a goal on the spiritual path, is not to be attained in the future.

It is the place we start from. It is within us. It is us, our essential self.

We cannot go towards it; we relax back into it

We are revealed as that

Rupert Spira

No preferences

The precious tree of nondual mind

spreads throughout the universe

it bears compassion in flower and fruit,

though there is no other,

and nobody “doing good

Tilopa, 988 – 1069, Indian tantric master and scholar, influential in the Buddhist Mahāmudrā/ Tibetian tradition

to realize and honour

All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul. 

You are here to realize and honour these possibilities. When love comes in to your life, unrecognized dimensions of your destiny awaken and blossom and grow. Possibility is the secret heart of time.

John O’Donohue, Anam Chara

Take a pause

The mental and emotional ‘pause’, the open state, allows the topic of one’s expectation to go down like the sun – and arise again in a fresh light. One can then pick up the thread of what one was doing or talking about with a fresh mind and a shift in perspective – or one can decide to drop it. There’s an opportunity for a transformative choice.

Because unless you’ve deliberately paused and released it, a thread of grievance or passion has just gone into storage – and will arise later. Threads don’t drop by themselves when the mind that is holding them moves into the background.

But the possibility that the pause offers is to place a topic under an open timeless light; having reviewed it, its basis can be seen and relinquished. And at other times, having let an idea rest in that aware space, new angles and insights into it arise as the mind re-engages.

Ajahn Sucitto

Always objecting

Time and again, in practice, all we really have to do is see the part of us that is either fearful or reluctant or objecting.

See that part – the one we think is the problem.

Once we can see that part, the one that we ourselves are objecting to, and believe to be problematic, and the origin of our difficulty in practice – once we see it, we can learn to simply be with it.

No need to do anything about it. Be with it.

Henry Shukman

Just like this

We experience a lot of moods and external stimuli during any one day. Rather than getting sucked in, can we dwell calmly, simply aware as they rise and pass away?

The mind and the externals are just thus.

The gate of liberation is open.

Dogen