There is a Tibetan saying: ‘When things are difficult, then let yourself be happy.’ Otherwise, if happiness is relying on others or the environment or your surroundings, it’s not possible. Like an ocean, the waves always go like that but underneath, it always remains calm. So we have that ability as well. On an intellectual level, we may see things as desperate, difficult. But underneath, at the emotional level, you can keep calm.
The Dalai Lama
People who practice mindfulness find that they don’t have to trust the narrative self –
that its lost its hold over them as the primary reference of truth and reality.
It’s such a sweet thing
To go from having been habitually convinced by this narrative self, to no longer being convinced by it, is a huge shift.
Henry Shukman, Mountain Cloud Zen Center
Develop a mind that alights nowhere
The Lotus Sutra
Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness
and just be happy
Guillaume Apollinaire, 1880 – 1918, French poet and playwright
The notion of a spirituality of subtraction comes from Meister Eckhart (c.1260-1327), the medieval Dominican mystic. He said the spiritual life has much more to do with subtraction than it does with addition. Yet I think most Christians today are involved in great part in a spirituality of addition.
The capitalist worldview is the only one most of us have ever known. The nature of the capitalist mind is that things (and often people!) are there for me. Finally, even God becomes an object for my consumption. Religion looks good on my résumé, and anything deemed “spiritual” is a check on my private worthiness list. Some call it spiritual consumerism. It is not the Gospel.
Richard Rohr, Radical Grace
[There are} things that ordinarily you would never dream of being able to tolerate, and having no motivation to in fact tolerate. And then, here is a place where not only can it be tolerated on the surface, but it actually turns out that you don’t need to tolerate it. . . . you can actually welcome it and simply let it be as it is, and then not generate a big story of “this is killing me” and so forth.
That was just one … particular moment. but it showed me something that I’ve never really forgotten, which is that it’s possible to turn towards what you most want to run away from. And then the whole landscape changes when you do that, because there was something in you, in me, that was recognizing that that sensation was not my sensation. And therefore I was already free of it in that moment. It’s not like I had to tolerate it and get good at grinning and bearing it and then it would go away. But no, at its most intense, I can be equanimous about it. And it wasn’t a thought, it was a direct experience.
Jon Kabat Zinn’s insight during a silent retreat which led him to apply mindfulness meditation to mainstream medicine
Mindfulbalance 