Tag: Joy

……Just watch stuff go by

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I came across a definition of meditation that it comes from the root meaning ‘right balance.’ That rang true for me because, personally, my attention is often so fragmented, egocentric, narcissistic or self-concerned that there isn’t a whole lot of inner balance or alignment with what is. Rather, I am stuck in a state of nonbalance. Right balance is when my mind is not spinning out endless movies and delusions, or maybe it still is but I am just not so attached to believing them. Meditation is when I can watch stuff go by and the part of me that usually interrupts and says, ‘That’s a good story, or that son of a bitch, or I’m guilty and awful,’ that part sits back and sees it as just one more story but without attachment to it.

Joan Borysenko, quoted in Oprah Magazine

Where we choose to focus

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities.

It is always our conscious choice which garden we will tend … when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that’s present — love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure — the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience heaven on earth.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

Sunlight, the cherry tree, the goodness of life, this Saturday morning…

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Hundreds of open flowers

all come from the one branch.

Look,  all their colours appear in my garden.

I open the door, and in the wind

I see the spring sunlight.

Already it has reached

worlds without number.

Sekiso, Worlds without number

Keeping our view of life fluid

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The pain, the discomfort, the sickness are what they are.

We can always cope with the way life moves and changes. The mind of an enlightened human being is flexible and adaptable. The mind of the ignorant person is conditioned and fixed.

Ajahn Sumedho

Be still……

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Everything inside and everything around us wants to reflect itself in us.

We don’t have to go anywhere to obtain the truth.

We only need to be still and things will reveal themselves in the still water of the heart

Thich Nhat Hahn

Each life makes a difference…..

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Somedays,  one realizes the truth of this more than at other times….We can see that we are not just “visiting” the world. We should not underestimate how we can support one another when we are there through good times and bad,  and how our lives affect each other and have value.

I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.…..

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver