Tag: Joy

Opening to the new year in front of us

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When we can establish an embodied openness, it’s a relief to have the personal world replaced with clear open space. When the movie of who we are turns off, there’s just the open mystery – and that’s wonderful. That’s how you really wake up; life is most alive when you can be present at the edge of the unknown. Death, separation, uncertainty – they’re all part of life……We have the original potential to handle, and in fact blossom, in the face of these. We don’t have to feel threatened, anxious, needy or inadequate. With wise openness, the main causes and conditions for human misery cease.

The gates to the good life are open. It’s only because we place so much emphasis on knowing what can’t be known – like the future (you can’t even know the next moment) and how other people are – that we close them. But when all is uncertain, all is possible. In such a light, wise openness is the most obvious faculty to develop, because the unknown is right here within and around us.

Ajahn Sucitto, Original Openness.

Sunday Quote: A motto for the year

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Expect nothing.

Live frugally on surprise.

Alice Walker


On not setting targets

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Again and again I therefore admonish my students in Europe and America: Don’t aim at success –  the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run … success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Genuine happiness comes from gently working with the mind

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If we could put as much effort into cleaning up our minds as we do sweeping our houses, washing our clothes and doing the dishes, we would likely be at ease. But when we talk about cleaning like this, people don’t know what we are getting at…I’ve come to think it’s because people don’t seek their own dwelling place. We scrub and sweep elsewhere. We don’t make our minds clean, so there is always confusion. We are always looking outside.

…These days there is only force and hurry. Mangoes are never sweet now. They are forced. Before they are ripe they picked and artificially ripened. This is done because people want to get them in a hurry. So when you eat them you find they are sour. To get something good, you have to allow it be sour first, according to its own natural way. But we pick them early and then complain that they are sour. For the most part things are imitations. We grasp the things that are false and uncertain as real…If the mind does not see and realize, there is no path to clarity. 

Ajahn Chah, Being Dharma

Where meaning is found

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The holiest of all holidays are those

Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;

The secret anniversaries of the heart

When the full river of feeling overflows

Longfellow, Holidays

Sunday Quote: Giving

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Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a “standing in,” not a “falling for.”

In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.

Erich Fromm