There is not one little blade of grass,
there is no colour in this world
that is not intended to make men rejoice.
John Calvin
Tag: Life
Balance, rooted in the body
Healing is a natural result of finding true balance.
If we relate to a balanced ease in the body, it brings us into the balance of our minds, and it is only from that basis that we can get a feel, through the tangle of anxieties and mood swings, of a simple thread of emotional ease and psychological space. It’s a shift from being tense or on guard, to something more trusting. And it’s through attending to this that we can step back from the biases and old narratives.
Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma
An unobserved life
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
Eric Hoffer, American moral and social philosopher.
In front of our eyes
Meditation is misunderstood as something you envision in your head, when in fact it is something to be seen with your own eyes.
What you begin to see is that the place where you thought your life occurred — rumination and memory, anxiety and fear — isn’t where your life takes place at all. Those mental recesses are where pain occurs, but life occurs elsewhere, in a place we are usually too preoccupied to notice, too distracted to see: right in front of our eyes.
The point of meditation is to stop making things up and see things as they are.
Karen Maezen Miller
Going with the flow
All of us rock back and forth between the tendency to hold on to ideas, experiences and emotions, and the ability to glide through the changes of our life. One reminder that can be helpful for being more fluid is to recognize our own watery-ness. We are also made up of earth (no wonder we get stuck sometimes), air (can’t make a commitment?), fire (sometimes passion helps), and space (ahhh…). But an overwhelming percentage of our physical make-up is water….Relating to waves of movement is what allows us to stay steady and sustain balance. The word “balance” comes from the Latin balare, meaning “to dance.” [And] you know what happens to water if it stays still — it either turns into ice or becomes brackish and unhealthy. The same thing happens when we try to latch on to a prescribed feeling or experience. If we can only relax a bit we will see that our feelings, both emotional and physical, are flowing all the time. It’s fun to think of your own body as a tiny part of the whole world of tides, rains, rivers and other people’s ninety-percent-water bodies. Can you let your body be the water bed that your heart and mind rest on?
Cyndi Lee, Go with the Flow
Today is where we live
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Philip Larkin
