If you don’t try to stop whatever is going on in your mind, but merely observe it, eventually you’ll begin to feel a tremendous sense of relaxation, a vast sense of openness within your mind – which is in fact your natural mind, the naturally unperturbed background against which various thoughts come and go.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
You spend so much of your time
expecting to become someone else
always someone who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you
meanwhile in your life you hardly notice
the world around you, lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself
with whom as you recall you were
never happy
to be left alone for long
William Stanley Merwin, American poet, To Waiting
Experiencing,
rather than trying to have special experiences,
is where real freedom lies
Ezra Bayda, At Home in the Muddy Water
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Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
Meister Eckhart
All of us know how difficult it is for us to be inside the present moment, to not be asleep to the real riches inside our own lives. The distractions and worries of daily life tend to so consume us that we habitually take for granted what’s most precious to us, our health, the miracle of our senses, the love and friendships that surround us, and the gift of life itself. We go through our daily lives not only with a lack of reflectiveness and lack of gratitude but with a habitual touch of resentment as well, a chronic, grey depression, Robert Moore calls it. We are very much asleep, both to God and to our own lives.
Ron Rolheiser
It’s not possible to be afraid of a baby. The way she looks at us, her smile, her eyes, even her fragility, her trust and her innocence seem to touch even the most profound places in the hearts of us adults. The child is able to penetrate the walls that we have constructed around our hearts to defend ourselves, to protect ourselves, to prove that we are independent, competent, and strong. A child reveals the child who is hidden inside each of us, the child whom we have buried behind these impenetrable walls of protection, of strength, and of our need to win. Within our societies based on rivalry, we are often afraid to show our weakness. Admitting weakness can be dangerous since it might lead to rejection. Instead we feel that we need to show our competence, our capability, our power, our knowledge. If not, we risk begin wounded, rejected, isolated, and scorned. The weakness of the child – especially of a very young child – does the opposite: it attracts us and makes us smile; it leads us to tenderness and communion. It awakens kindness. …….awakened by something outside of me, and yet it is what is deepest within me. It is “me. All of us, at the deepest level of our being, are wounded children who are searching for love, for tenderness.
Jean Vanier, Christmas Letter, 2011
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