Keep your heart clear and spacious
and you will never be hooked.
A single disturbed thought
causes ten thousand distractions
Ryokan, Zen Buddhist monk, 1758 – 1831
photo Adityamadhav83
Tag: inspiration
It’s mid-week: Jump into life
Hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think… and think… while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time
before death.
If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten —
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest
that does all the work.
Kabir.
photo GFDL
Every step is a good step
Every time we make a mindful step, we are engaged in an act of enlightenment.
We can be enlightened about the fact that we are making a step.
Each step can have beauty in it.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Sunday Quote: Losing our fears
Who sees all beings in his own Self
and his own Self in all beings,
loses all fear.
Isha Upanishad
Our original mind
Mind has no colour; it is not long or short;
it does not vanish or appear; it is free from purity and impurity alike; and its duration is eternal.
It is utter stillness.
Such, then, is the form and shape of our original mind,
which is also our original body.
Hui Hai 720 – 814
photo alvesgaspar
Holding both sides
Our problems are a big deal for us.
So we need to make space for an attitude of honouring things completely and at the same time not making them a big deal. It’s a paradoxical idea, but holding these two attitudes simultaneously is the source of enormous joy: we hold a sense of respect toward all things, along with the ability to let go. In Buddhist terms, the space that opens is referred to as ‘shunyata,’ or emptiness. It’s basically just a feeling of lightness. When you begin to see life from the point of view that everything is spontaneously arising and that things aren’t ‘coming at you’ or ‘trying to attack you,’ in any given moment you will likely experience more space and more room to relax into. So shunyata refers to the fact that we actually have a seed of spaciousness, of freshness, openness, relaxation, in us.
Pema Chodron
photo Manfred Werner
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