Your way of explaining events to yourself determines how helpless you can become, or how energized, when you encounter the everyday setbacks as well as momentous defeats.
Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism
Tag: Life
Creating ourselves
We are always in a perpetual state of being created and creating ourselves. We will never be the same, and we have never been quite the way we are right in this moment. This emergence of being as we flow from state to state is characterized by an underlying sense that there is an incredible amount of freedom and cohesion within the system in a given moment. As a person’s states of mind emerge in ways determined by the systems own constraints and by the external constraints of interpersonal connections with others, the self is perpetually being created
Dan Siegel, The Developing Mind; How Relationships and the Brain interact to Shape who we are
Today, choose…
At any given moment, you can choose to follow the chain of thoughts, emotions, and sensations that reinforce a perception of yourself as vulnerable and limited — or you can remember that you true nature is pure, unconditioned, and incapable of being harmed.
If you’re determined to think of yourself as limited, fearful, vulnerable, or scarred by past experience, know only that you have chosen to do so.
The opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Waiting for something to happen
We have a tendency sometimes to put our lives on hold or believe that conditions will somehow be different in the future and then we will start to put our plans into action. Or maybe we find ourselves looking for something to come from outside or waiting on someone else’s plans. In this way, we risk missing out on opportunities which already present themselves or on what was right in front of our noses all the time, and which we do not take for fear of making a mistake or because we are waiting for some “perfect” moment.
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.
Thoreau
Don’t solidify your emotions into who you are
Through tuning in to the steady flow of the body’s in- and out-breathing, how we actually are gets to feel good. With a steady bodily presence to relate to, the heart sense doesn’t get wound up in its emotions, and how we are doesn’t solidify into who I really am. And this is good news. Because then there can be empathy with others rather than projections and reactions. We’re less needy and therefore less disappointed by other people being the way they are. There is presence, empathy and clear thinking, and they support each other. That’s enough.
Ajahn Sucitto
Being truly in the present
If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything.
When a child presents himself to you with his smile, if you are not really there – thinking about the future or the past, or preoccupied with other problems – then the child is not really there for you. The technique of being alive is to go back to yourself in order for the child to appear like a marvellous reality. Then you can see him smile and you can embrace him in your arms.
Thich Nhat Hahn
