Our Solid selves

Our whole world falls apart, and we’ve been given this great opportunity. However, we don’t trust our basic wisdom mind enough to let it stay like that. Our habitual reaction is to want to get ourselves back – even our anger, resentment, fear, or bewilderment. So we re-create our solid, immovable personality as if we were Michelangelo chiseling ourselves out of marble.

By becoming aware of how we do this silly thing again and again because we don’t want to dwell in the uncertainty and awkwardness and pain of not knowing, we begin to develop true compassion for ourselves and everyone else, because we see what happens and how we react when things fall apart. That awareness is what turns the sword into a flower. It is how what is seemingly problematic and unwanted actually becomes our teacher.

Pema Chodron, When Things fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

The familiar

Let go of the mind, the thousand blue
story fragments we tell ourselves
each day to keep the world underfoot.

If you can awaken
inside the familiar
and discover it strange
you need never leave home.

 

Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser,  Braided Creek : A Conversation in Poetry

Too busy to live

No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it.

Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn… Learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.

Seneca, On the Shortness of LIfe

A place of surrender

If we pay attention, we will realize that every moment around us, there is a world that we did not create that’s been there for 13.8 billion years, and there’s trillions of cells in your body that are doing what they’re supposed to do, and all of nature, everything.

You wake up and you realize, “I’m not doing any of this. I didn’t make my body. I didn’t make my mind think. I don’t make my heart beat. I don’t make my breath breathe, etc, etc, yet I have this notion that I have to make things happen. Yet, all throughout the universe, things are happening everywhere and I’m not doing them, so why exactly am I the one that’s in charge of what’s unfolding in front of me?”

What you realize at some point is that you’re not; that the moment in front of you that’s unfolding is no different than all the zillions of other moments that aren’t in front of you that are unfolding in accordance to the laws of nature, the laws of creation. You start to practice saying, “I want to pay attention to what the universe is creating in front of me just like it’s creating everywhere where I’m not, and let me see how I can participate in that – be part of that – instead of interfering with it with my desires and my fears.

That’s living from a place of surrender.

Michael Singer, Living From A Place Of Surrender, Sounds True Blog

A motto for life

More from the always inspiring Dogen. Very little can be added to this as we start another week…

In performing your duties maintain

joyful mind,

kind mind

and great mind

Dogen, 1200 – 1253, Buddhist monk, founder of the Soto school of Zen.

Life is filled with many wonders

We often ask, “What’s wrong?” Doing so, we invite painful seeds of sorrow to come up and manifest. We feel suffering, anger, and depression, and produce more such seeds. We would be much happier if we tried to stay in touch with the healthy, joyful seeds inside of us and around us. We should learn to ask, “What’s not wrong?” and be in touch with that. There are so many elements in the world and within our bodies, feelings, perceptions, and consciousness that are wholesome, refreshing, and healing. If we block ourselves, if we stay in the prison of our sorrow, we will not be in touch with these healing elements.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step