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

Sunday Quote: within

Look within.

Within is the wellspring of good;

and it is always ready to bubble up, if you just dig.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

in mud, the lotus blooms

There is a hard truth to be told:

before Spring becomes beautiful

it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck…

But in that muddy mess,

the conditions for rebirth are being created

Parker Palmer

Start over

The first days of a new Spring

There is no expected pace for inner learning. 

What we need to learn comes when we need it, no matter how old or young, no matter how many times we have to start over, no matter how many times we have to learn the same lesson. 

We fall down as many times as we need to , to learn how to fall and get up. We fall in love as many times as we need to , to learn how to hold and be held. We suffer pain as often as is necessary for us to learn how to break and how to heal. No one really likes this of course, but we deal with our dislike in the same way, again and again, until we learn what we need to know about the humility of acceptance.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening