When the stories of our life no longer bind us, we discover within them something greater.
We discover that within the very limitations of form, of our maleness and femaleness, of our parenthood and our childhood, of gravity on the earth and the changing of the seasons, is the freedom and harmony we have sought for so long.
Our individual life is an expression of the whole mystery, and in it we can rest in the center of the movement, the center of all worlds.
Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart
Let me fall if I must.
The one I will become will catch me
Baal Shem Tov, 1698 – 1760, Jewish mystic, regarded as the founder of Hasidic Judaism
“You don’t have to
prove anything” my mother said. “Just be ready
for what God sends“
Poet William Stafford died of a heart attack in August 1993, having written a poem that morning with these words…
The start of a New Year often gives rise to a restless energy, thoughts of needing to do better, to achieve more, to comparing our actual life with some better life, berating ourselves for perceived failures and shortcomings. Dogen reminds us to let go of this drama, these continually shifting ideas created by the mind, and rest in a sense of completeness
No creature ever falls short of its own completeness
Wherever it stands it does not fail to cover the ground.
Dogen
Two quotes from Mazu, 709–88, one of the greatest of the ancient Chinese Chan (Zen) masters, to remind us to live in the immediacy of the present moment and not in how our thoughts tell us what our life should be like:
When successive thoughts do not await one another,
and each thought dies peacefully away,
this is called absorption in the oceanic reflection.
A monk asked, “What is the essential meaning of Buddhism?”
Mazu said, “What is the meaning of this moment?”
Christmas and New Year can give rise to a lot of “I am” or “I am not” thoughts…
We tend to just react and take it for granted that all the ‘I am’ and ‘I am not’ is the truth. We create ourselves as a personality and attach to our memories. We remember the things we learned, we remember what we’ve done – generally the more extreme things; we tend to forget more ordinary things. In meditation we are bringing awareness to the conditions of the mind here and now, just by being aware of this sense of ‘I am, I am not’. The thought ‘I am’ is an impermanent condition. The thought ‘I am not’ is an impermanent condition.
Ajahn Sumedho, Investigating the Mind
Mindfulbalance 