We have a deep need to feel as if we are in control ….
We are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance —
and changes us, even if we do not reach it, into something else.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Not our doing
Tag: Life
Stirring things up
Eventually you will see that the real cause of problems is not life itself.
It’s the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes the problems.
Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul
Let be
To let go does not mean to get rid of.
To let go means to let be.
When we let be with compassion, things come and go on their own
Jack Kornfield
Sunday Quote: What we feed
When we meditate,
we are training the mind to stop feeding a pain pattern
Ruth King, Meditation teacher, Healing Rage: Women Making Inner Peace Possible
Beware
Ordinariness is a simple presence in this moment that allows the mystery of life to show itself. When Thoreau warns us to “beware of any activity that requires the purchase of new clothes” he reminds us that simplicity is the way we open to everyday wonder.
Ordinariness is interested in what is here and now….the ordinary mystery of breathing or of walking, the mystery of trees on our streets or of loving someone near to us. It is not based on attaining mystical states or extraordinary powers. It does not seek to become something special, but is emptying, listening.
Jack Kornfield, Bringing home the Dharma
I don’t care
The most prophetic thing Thomas Merton ever did was to say to a shopkeeper who asked him what brand of toothpaste he preferred, “I don’t care”. Merton was intrigued by the store clerk’s response. “He almost dropped dead” he wrote, “I was supposed to feel strongly about Colgate or Pepsodent or something with five colours. And they all have a secret ingredient. But I didn’t care about the secret ingredient ….the worst thing you can do now is not care about these things”
The ultimate goal of the marketer is to have us see consumer products not as mere things, but as keys to our identity. Brands are marks that owners put on their property …., and we are in perilous territory when our self-image, and even our self-worth, is founded on which brands and labels we can afford to purchase and display.
Kathleen Norris, The Secret Ingredient
