Let go of what has passed
Let go of what may come in the future
Let go of what is happening now.
Don’t try to figure it out
Don’t try to make anything happen
Rest, let it settle itself
The Six Key Words of Advice from Tilopa, 988 – 1069, an Indian tantric master and scholar, preserved in the Buddhist Mahāmudrā/ Tibetian tradition
All this rushing
Will soon be over;
For it is in lingering
That we receive insight.
Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
How do we enter our lives fully? How do we want to live?
Can we allow all our joys and sorrows to enliven us? Or do we just go along with all our patterns and habits? People who are dying always remind me: ‘I can’t believe I wasn’t here for most of my life.’ That’s one of the most common things I hear, and the biggest regrets. Many people have not inhabited their life because they’re just waiting for other moments. Are we waiting for life to happen in the midst of life? How can we give ourselves fully to our lives, moment to moment?
Don’t wait. Life is always right here.
Koshin Paley Ellison
When you get out of the driver’s seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself.
When you get out of the driver’s seat, it can drive itself so much easier – it can flow in ways you never imagined.
Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the “me” is no longer in the way.
Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.
Adyashanti
The mind is always seeking zones of safety, and these zones of safety are continually falling apart. Then we scramble to get another zone of safety back together again. We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart.
That’s samsara: The cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.
Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape
In the old Irish, Celtic, calendar, Autumn begins in August, so now we are reaching the end of the second month of the season. In Irish the word for September is Meán Fómhair, which means the ‘middle of the harvest’. What do we harvest? The fruits of what we have planted in our lives.
There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control over its development and to make it available in large quantities. Success brings many rewards and often fame. Fruits however, come from weakness and vulnerability. And fruits are unique. A child is the fruit conceived in vulnerability, community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another’s wounds. Let’s remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness.
Henri Nouwen
