What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments,
but what is woven into the lives of others.
Pericles
Tag: inspiration
Slowly making sense of our lives
The art of awareness of God, the art of sensing his presence in our daily lives cannot be learned offhand.
God’s grace resounds in our lives like a staccato. Only by retaining the seemingly disconnected notes comes the ability to grasp the theme.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
The easiest way to cultivate happiness today
We often ask, ‘what’s wrong?’ Doing so, we invite painful seeds of sorrow to come up and manifest. We feel suffering, anger, and depression, and produce more such seeds. We would be much happier if we tried to stay in touch with the healthy, joyful seeds inside of us and around us. We should learn to ask, ‘what’s not wrong?’ and be in touch with that.”
Thich Nhat Hahn
Trying to find happiness in the wrong way
I think it’s odd for people to say, “I meditate,” or “I don’t meditate.” It’s like saying either you work with your mind or you don’t. The reality is that whether or not we are working with our mind in formal meditation, one way or another we are always working with our mind. Most of the time we’re using it to meditate on “me.” We’re using it to become familiar with our immediate reactions to the world around us. Somebody has something we want, so we “meditate” on jealousy. We don’t get something we want, or we do get something we don’t want, so we “meditate” on anger. Our root meditation is, “What about me? Will I get what I want today?” Our mind is continuously chasing itself around, trying to secure happiness in all the wrong ways. Its speed and reactivity keep us under siege. There’s so little space that by the end of the day we feel physically exhausted. We are drained by our continual meditation on the mental fabrication known as “me.”
Meditation is about taming our mind by engaging our mind, with enthusiasm and inspiration. With practice we become grounded in the experience of basic goodness. This leads us toward a healthy sense of self.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
Running away from things, we do not live life directly
It seems the more we express, that is, the more we bring out what is in, the more alive we are. The more we give voice to our pain in living, the less build up we have between our soul and our way in the world. However, the more we push down and keep in, the smaller we become. The more we stuff between our heart and our daily experience, the more we have to work through to feel life directly. Our unexpressed life can become a callous we carry around and manicure, but never remove…..Just as flowers need healthy root systems in order to blossom, feelings can only express their beauty when they are rooted cleanly within us, breaking ground in some manner, sprouting outside us.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
If we stopped moving…
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Paolo Neruda, Keeping Quiet
Mindfulbalance 