Tag: Life

Look out, and breathe

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We are encouraged to drop the storyline and simply pause, look out, and breathe. Simply be present for a few seconds, a few minutes, a few hours, a whole lifetime, with our own shifting energies and with the unpredictability of life as it unfolds, wholly partaking in all experiences just exactly as they are. What I’m advocating is that in that precious moment we start to make choices that lead to happiness and freedom rather than choices that lead to unnecessary suffering and the obscuration of our intelligence, our warmth, our capacity to remain open and present with the natural movement of life. 

Pema Chodron

Resting on the waves

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To find the Buddhist law, drift east and west, come and go, entrusting yourself to the waves.

Ryokon, 18th Century Zen poet

The “Buddhist law” refers to the truth of how things really are. We can’t understand the nature of reality until we let go of controlling our experience.There’s no way to see clearly what’s going on if on some level we’re attempting to ignore or bypass the stormy weather.

By not resisting, by letting the waves wash through me, I began to relax. Rather than fighting the stormy surges, I rested in an ocean of awareness that embraced all the moving waves. I’d arrived in a sanctuary that felt large enough to hold whatever was going on in my life.

Tara Brach, Entrusting Yourself to the Waves

Restricted by labels

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Keep asking “What idea of self have I dreamed up today?

Zenkei Blanche Hartman,1926-2016, Soto Zen teacher

Sunday Quote: Be fully present

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If we live everything,

life will be faithful to us.  

John O’Donohue

Patient

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The monk who bakes bread

no longer believes in the measure-for-measure God of the recipe books,

has little faith, if any, in the predestined endings set forth by timers,

the finely sifted claims to inerrancy held by cups and spoons.

Blended to life, call his a leavened devotion to resurrection

appearing from within each cracked tomb of grain,

the hunger that presses his hands dawn after dawn,

deep into the just-risen flesh.

Cowl white as the flour he scoops, mixes,

forms pat pat into loaves shaped like naves,

it is his chest, filled with the invisible yeast of breath,

that knows by heart the patient kneading together of days,

how long love takes to rise.

Daniel Skach-Mills, American poet.

In front of you

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A drop of water has the tastes of the water of the seven seas: there is no need to experience all the ways of worldly life.

The reflections of the moon on one thousand rivers are from the same moon: the mind must be full of light.


Hung Tzu-Ch’eng, 1572-1620, Chinese Philosopher