The seed of suffering in you may be strong,
but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Tag: Meditation
Dealing with reality, step by step
What is actually important is here and now. Now is definitely now. There’s no point in thinking that the past that exists we could have now. This is now. This very moment. Nothing mystical, just now, very simple and straightforward. From that nowness however, arises a sense of intelligence, always, that you are constantly interacting with the reality, one by one, spot by spot, constantly. We actually experience fantastic precision, always. But we are threatened by the now so we jump to the past or the future. That’s the problem. And that is not trusting the nowness properly. Now possesses a lot of powerful things. It is so powerful that we can’t face it, therefore we have to borrow from the past to invite the future, all the time
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
The difference between activity and meaning
Many men go fishing all their lives
without knowing that it is not fish they are after
Henry David Thoreau
Accepting our nature…
Carl Jung had a few years when he suffered from some type of illness, which meant that he withdrew from teaching at university and found himself unable to read any serious scientific literature. He also was unable to write much during that time. However, this outward inactivity led him to a very important interior realization, which is close to what we work at in mindfulness practice each day – to accept the “conditions of existence” as we simply see them. It seems to be a strange psychological truth, affirmed by him and by Carl Rogers, that when we accept something in this gentle way, shifts begin to occur and change happens more easily. Being fully open to whatever is happening means that we can let go of fear and control and of our tendency to place demands on this moment, insisting that it be other than it is:
Something else, too, came to me from my illness. I might formulate that it was an affirmation of things as they are: an unconditional “yes” to that which is, without subjective protests – acceptance of the conditions of existence as I see them and understand them, acceptance of my nature, as I happen to be.
Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections
Allowing space for the symbolic
The tendency to demand ever more signs to replace symbols..makes our lives more and more factual, intellectually strenuous, wedded to the march of mundane causes, and beset by disconcerting surprises…A life that does not incorporate some degree of ritual, of gesture and attitude, has no mental anchorage. It is prosaic to the point of total indifference, purely casual, devoid of that structure of intellect and feeling which we call “personality”
Susan Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
Different ways of getting to heaven
Sometimes ideas can give us insight. Some other times, it can be simple little encounters, when for a brief second, the mind is stilled and we see into the heart of things. Their newness, or their beauty, shock us briefly, giving us relief from the preoccupations in our mind, or the routine of daily activity, and we are nourished within. We try to create some space for such moments today.
There is the heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.
Mary Oliver, Yellow
