Tag: Life

Sunday Quote: Sitting with dragons

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File:Chinese draak.jpg

Our deepest fears

are the dragons guarding from us

our greatest treasures.

Rilke

A solid place

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File:Mount Asgard 3 2001-07-25.jpg

When you think about yourself and who you are, who you should be, who you would like to be, who you do not want to be – how good or bad, wonderful or horrible you are, all this whirls around, it goes all over the place. One moment you can feel ” I am a really wonderful person”, the next moment you can feel ” I am an absolutely hopeless, horrible person”. But if you take refuge in awareness, then whatever you are thinking does not make much difference, because your refuge is in this ability of awareness, rather than in the gyrations and fluctuations of the self-view.

Ajahn Sumedho, Intuitive Awareness

Photo: Ansgar Walk

What you already have within

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focus stained glass

And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

Rilke, Book of Images

Curious about the mind

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File:Curiosity in children.jpg

The path of meditation and the path of our lives altogether has to do with curiosity, inquisitiveness. The ground is ourselves; we’re here to study ourselves and to get to know ourselves now, not later.  One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are. That’s not considered to be a problem; the point is to see it.

Pema Chodron.

photo Vitold Muratov

Being comfortable with non-doing

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The emptiness of the desert makes it possible to learn the almost impossible:

the joyful acceptance of our uselessness. 

Ivan Illich

Deepening our trust in ourselves

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stairs

Genuine faith is born of the ability to trust in what is most fundamentally true within ourselves. Circumstance will change, and all manner of things pleasant and unpleasant will arise and fall away; sometimes our lives will be touched with joy, and at other times we will be given tremendous pain and sorrow. Many times we will be afraid. But the object of faith is not to eliminate difficult circumstances, nor is faith about trusting in a God who will rescue us from hurt or who – if only believe strongly enough – will make everything better. The real question of faith is when pain and loss inevitably come our way, do we withdraw in fear that we will be destroyed, or do we deepen our trust in our innate capacity to endure them?

Wayne Muller