What must be increased is the ability to observe.
What we observe is always secondary
Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen
Sunday Quote: The process, not the content
Tag: Meditation
Learning from nature
Calming allows us to rest, and resting is a precondition for healing. When animals in the forest get wounded, they find a place to lie down, and they rest completely for many days. They don’t think about food or anything else. They just rest, and they get the healing they need. When we humans get sick, we just worry! We look for doctors and medicine, but we don’t stop. Even when we go to the beach or the mountains for a vacation, we don’t rest, and we come back more tired than before. We have to learn to rest. Lying down is not the only position for resting. During sitting or walking meditation, we can rest very well. Meditation does not have to be hard labor. Just allow your body and mind to rest like an animal in the forest. Don’t struggle. There is no need to attain anything.
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching,
Round and round
There is a whole drama department in our head, and the casting director indiscriminately handing out the roles of inner dictators and judges, adventurers and prodigal sons, inner entitlement and inner impoverishment. ….When we see how compulsively these thoughts repeat themselves, we being to understand the psychological truth of samsara, the Sanskrit word for circular, repetitive existence…..Samsara also describes the unhealthy repetitions in our daily life. On a moment-to-moment level, we can see our samsaric thought patters re-arise, in unconscious and limited ways. For example, we see how frequently our thoughts include fear, judgment, or grasping. Our thoughts try to justify our point of view. As an Indian saying points out: “He who cannot dance claims the floor is uneven.”
Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology
Where the attention is
If you are doing something to avoid pain, then pain is running your life. All of your thoughts and feelings will be affected by your fears.
Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul
of ordinary things
It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
Pat Schneider, 1934 – 2020, American writer, poet, writing teacher and editor
Just enjoy
When a ray of sunshine comes, open out, absorb it to the depths of your being. Never think that an hour earlier you were cold and that an hour later you will be cold again. Just enjoy. Latch on to the passing minute. Shut off the workings of memory and hope… Take away from suffering its double drumbeat of resonance, memory and fear. Suffering may persist, but already it is relieved by half. Throw yourself into each moment as if it were the only one that really existed.
Jacques Lusseyran, 1924–1971, And there was Light.
Lusseyran became blind after a childhood accident, worked with the Resistance in World War Two and survived the Concentration Camp at Buchenwald.
Thanks to Maura Parolini for the quote suggestion. It is taken from the beautiful site The Marginalian
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