Most of us have learned to live, or have been encouraged to live, in a manner where we get love.
We want to be loved, and we think that being loved is the highest point.
But actually, loving is the highest point.
Stephen Levine
Tag: Look for Happiness
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
Confusion: Seeking outside for what can only come from within
The confused heart, having lost joy within itself, seeks…..consolation outside.
The more it seeks exterior goods, the more it lacks the interior joy to which it can return
Hugh Feiss, osb
Facing our pain
Some of us have a hard time believing that we are actually able to face our own pain. We have convinced ourselves that our pain is too deep, too frightening, something to avoid at all costs. Yet if we finally allow ourselves to feel the depth of that sadness and gently let it break our hearts, we may come to feel a great freedom, a genuine sense of release and peace, because we have finally stopped running away from ourselves and from the pain that lives within us.
Wayne Muller, Legacy of the Heart
Today – notice something you never noticed before
….Go into the fields, consider
the orderliness of the world. Notice
something you have never noticed before….
A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.
Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.
Live with the beetle, and the wind.
Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud: A Poem
Heaven, Hell and Limbo
Contemplate beginning. When you think of birth you think of ‘I was born’, but that is the great birth of the body, which we can’t remember. The ordinary birth of ‘me’ which we experience, in daily life is ‘I want, I don’t want, I like, I don’t like.’ That’s a birth, or seeking to be happy. We contemplate the ordinary hell of our own anger, the anger that arises, the heat of the body, the aversion, the hatred we feel in the mind. We contemplate the ordinary heaven we experience, the happy states, the bliss, the lightness, the beauty in the here and now. Or just the dull state of mind, that kind of limbo, neither happy nor unhappy, but dull, bored and indifferent. In meditation we watch all these within ourselves. So in practice we are looking at the universe as it is reflected in our own minds..
Ajahn Sumedho
Mindfulbalance 