Courage is like – it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue:
you get it by courageous acts.
It’s like you learn to swim by swimming.
You learn courage by couraging.
Mary Daly
Tag: Joy
Surviving life, with its ups and downs
We just need to remember to practice relaxing into our life, in all its joys and sorrows, and to relinquish the need to know what’s going to happen next. The third element of patience is acceptance of the truth, meaning that we accept our experience as it is – with all its suffering – rather than how we want it to be. We recognize that because our experience is continually changing, we don’t need it to be different than it is. This acceptance of “things as they are” requires profound wisdom and compassion, which takes a long time to evolve; we must therefore develop a long-enduring mind that will enable us to understand time from a radically new perspective.
Michele McDonald, Finding patience
Bring your mind to the present moment
I think the most important thing is to consciously choose to bring your mind to the present moment. How do you do that? You decide that you’re going to see what your eyes are looking at; you bring your consciousness to the present moment. When you are going up the stairs, you look at the steps, you look at the handrail. Most of us unconsciously climb the steps, never think about the steps, can’t even say what the color of the carpet is, if there is a carpet, because we’re somewhere else.
Pay attention to the present moment. Bring your mind, bring your ears to the present moment, start savoring the awareness of the information you perceive in the present moment, and let that grow. And it’s like with any circuitry: the more you concentrate on it and experience it, the more it will develop itself.
Jill Boite Taylor
It is the heart that notices
The weather has changed these days. Not as settled or as consistently warm as it has been in the previous weeks. However, the wind brings a different texture. Why do we prefer one thing to another? Things are different, but equally beautiful.
The dance of the flower in the wind, in the sun, in the rain,
cannot be understood by the head;
the heart has to be open for it.
Osho
What matters
Each morning we are born again.
What we do today
is what matters most
Buddha
Keep it simple
Here Ajahn Chah, one of the most influential teachers of the last Century, gives beautiful, simple instructions for mindfulness of the breath, the foundational practice for all meditation. We can see that it is normal for the mind to wander and how we should accept this gently. This simple exercise can be done formally today, or informally between meetings, waiting in a queue, while taking a break:
Keep your attention on the breath. Perhaps other thoughts will enter the mind. It will take up other themes and distract you. Don’t be concerned. Just take up the breathing again as the object of attention
Ajahn Chah, Bodhinyana
Mindfulbalance 