You will never be able to experience everything.
So please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.
Camus
Tag: Life
A small glimpse of abundance
Perhaps the real point of life is simply to wear us down until we have no choice but to start abandoning our defenses. We learn that the way things are is simply the way they are meant to be right now, and then, suddenly, at long last, we catch a glimpse of the abundance in the moment.
Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey, An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Anxiety
If you’re human, you experience anxiety. The choice is whether to experience anxiety in the service of neurosis or in the service of waking up….We can invest in denying the truth of our vulnerabilities, thereby gaining pseudo-security at the cost of chronic anxiety. Or we can commit to experiencing our vulnerabilities moment by moment, gaining confidence that we can work with whatever arises- anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, etc. Either way, there’s anxiety. Own the embodied intensity as a valid part of your life and be kind to this experience.
Bruce Tift, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation
Not the form we expect
All life worth living is difficult, nobody promised us happiness;
it is not a commodity you have earned, or shall ever earn.
It is a by-product of brave living, and it never comes in the form we expect, or at the season we hoped for, or as the result of our planning for it.
Katherine Anne Porter 1890 – 1980, American journalist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist.
Letting go of self development
When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves – from other people, relationships, or material goods – or from our own self-development, we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion. But according to Buddhism, such a strategy is doomed.
Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.
Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness
Joy in every circumstance
A lovely image of joy in the midst of the changing currents of life
On a branch
floating downriver
a cricket, singing.
Issa, Japanese Buddhist poet, 1763-1827
