You should not take personally things that actually aren’t personal.
It turns out when you start to really dig down underneath it, there’s very little that’s personal.
Taking things personally is a prescription for infinite suffering.
Jon Kabat Zinn
photo of cows disturbing a walk along the beach at Whitepark Bay, Ireland, by gtapp
This mind of ours is naturally peaceful. It’s still and calm like a leaf that is not being blown about by the wind…
Why the mind doesn’t feel peaceful right now is because it gets lost in its own moods. There’s nothing to mind itself. It simply abides in its natural state, that’s all. That sometimes the mind feels peaceful and other times not peaceful is because it has been tricked by moods. The untrained mind lacks wisdom. Moods come and trick it into feeling pleasure one minute and suffering the next. Happiness then sadness. But the natural state of a person’s mind isn’t one of happiness or sadness. This experience of happiness and sadness is not the actual mind itself, but just these moods which have tricked it. The mind gets lost, carried away by these moods with no idea what’s happening. It still isn’t very clever. And we go on thinking that it’s our mind which is suffering or our mind which is happy, when actually it’s just lost in its various moods.
Ajahn Chah, Training this Mind
The weekend can allow us get out into nature and into its pace, learning its balance and wisdom. It is a useful corrective to the speed which modern society – and workplaces – consider necessary, and to the importance which it places on passing trends:
The internal activity of analysis, speculation, memory, investigation, cross-referencing, decision-making, and self-evaluation can amount to a volume of overwhelming proportions. Then the experience of overload develops into one of exhaustion, or of a pressure in our lives that diminishes peace and joy… This is the loss of balance that we can rightly experience as being flooded.
It isn’t the world per se, nor is it that we are chronically unbalanced;
it’s just that the right relationship hasn’t been struck.
Ajahn Sucitto, Parami
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure
with a liberal allowance of time.
Henry David Thoreau
photo of the Mourne mountains, County Down by ardfern
Life is a living of who we are, until that form of self can no longer hold us, and …we must break the forms that contain us in order to birth our way into the next self. This is how we shed our many ways of seeing the world, not that any are false, but that each serves its purpose for a time until we grow and they no longer serve us.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
photo lionel allorge
What do Sad people have in
Common?
It seems
They have all built a shrine
To the past
And often go there
And do a strange wail and
Worship.
What is the beginning of
Happiness?
It is to stop being
so religious
Like that.
Hafiz
Photo: Fahan, Co Donegal, Ireland by Andreas Borchert
