When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything.
The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything
Shunryu Suzuki roshi, Zen Mind, Beginniers Mind
Sunday Quote: Inner work
Tag: Life
For the good
Albert Einstein once said that the most important question a human being could answer is, ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’ A spiritually optimistic point of view holds that the universe is woven out of a fabric of love. Everything that is happening is ultimately for the good if we are willing to face it head-on and use our adversities for soul growth. As soon as we begin to …..open to faith in a friendly universe, the proverbial path opens before us. The people, events and teachings we need are supplied. This is the action of grace.
Joan Borysenko, Fire in the Soul: A New Spirituality of Spiritual Optimism
What are we nurturing?
The environment we create
will determine what prevails.
In other words, what we nurture and encourage wins
Jane Goodall, 1934 – English primatologist and anthropologist.
Like an elephant
In one of his insightful talks Zen master Shunryu Suzuki said that in your practice you should walk like an elephant.
It means to move at a comfortable pace. No rushing toward a goal. No push to make it all meaningful. The … texts of Taoism and Zen teach that it’s important to do what you do without trying to accomplish anything.
You don’t have to get anywhere. There are no goals and objectives: nothing to succeed in, and nothing in which to fail. You can sit in your house, as Thoreau did, and be attentive – his suggestion. “We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery. May we not probe it, pry into it, employ ourselves about it – a little? . . . If by watching all day and all night I may detect some trace of the Ineffable, then will it not be worth the while to watch?”
Thomas Moore, A Religion of One’s Own: A Guide to Creating a Personal Spirituality in a Secular World
Sunday Quote: Underneath all the noise
Water is free from the birth
and death of a wave.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Undisturbed
I gaze on myself in the stream’s emerald flow,
Sit on a boulder by a cliff.
My mind, a lonely cloud,
Leans on nothing, needs nothing
From the world and its endless events.
HanShan, Chinese Buddhist and Taoist poet
Mindfulbalance 