The key

The key to our deepest happiness

lies in changing our vision

of where to find it

Sharon Salzberg, Finding your Way

Sunday Quote: Marvelous soul

Every speck of dust has a marvelous soul,

but to understand it, one must recover one’s religious and magical sense of things.

Joan Miró, 1993 – 1983, Catalan painter, sculptor and ceramicist 

What happiness is

I have come to see that our problem is that we don’t know what happiness is. We confuse it with a life uncluttered by feelings of anxiety, rage, doubt, and sadness. But happiness is something entirely different. It’s the ability to receive the pleasant without grasping and the unpleasant without condemning.

Mark Epstein

Go with the flow

Get out of the construction business!

Stop building bridges across the raging waters of samsaric existence, attempting to reach the “far shore,” nirvana.

Better to simply relax, at ease and carefree, in total naturalness, and just go with the primordial flow, however it occurs and happens.

And remember this: whether or not you go with the flow, it always goes with you.

Nyoshül Khenpo Rinpoche, 1932 – 1999 , Tibetan lama

Weather

Very appropriate for Ireland this Autumn as we seem to go from one Atlantic Storm to the next. Also true of the difficulties in our lives.

When I interviewed Maya Angelou she told me to write this sentence on my notepad and to never forget it:

“Every storm runs out of rain”

I still think of that line to this day.

Alex Banayan, American author

The here-and-now

The body only exists in the present moment; it doesn’t wander off into the past or the future. This might seem like an insignificant truism; however, when we start to look at our lives closely, we find that much of our difficulty and distress arises from dwelling on re-creations of the past – either positive or negative – or on hopes and worries about the future.

Despite the fact that, to the thinking mind, the past and the future seem like vast and solid realities…the closer we look at the experience of our life as it actually is, the more we see the past and future as hollow fabrications. They are mere memories and anticipations; it is rather the present that is vast and all-encompassing, and full of useful possibilities…. If we are trying to inhabit an imagined future or a reconstructed past, how can we possibly attune to the orchestra of life in the here-and-now?

Ajahn Amaro, “The Body of Truth” in Michael Stone (ed) Freeing the Body.