When thoughts swarm like flies, pay them no attention.
Do not wrestle with them; do not entertain them.
Let them pass as if they were nothing,
and return to that silent, nameless yearning for the Ultimate
The Cloud of Unknowing, 14th Century anonymous work on Christian meditation
Someone once asked me, ‘How do you bear the suffering of the world?’
I said, ‘I make my mind bigger.’
There’s always enough room when we stop conflating ‘being with’ and ‘being overwhelmed by.’
Sylvia Boorstein
In Zen archery, the archer doesn’t shoot the arrow; the arrow shoots itself. The moment you aim, you’ve already missed. This is the paradox of wu wei: the harder you try, the more you obstruct the flow. But when you surrender all trying, the universe acts through you. A dancer becomes the dance; a singer becomes the song. There’s no separation between the artist and the art.
This is why Lao Tzu says, ‘The Tao never acts, yet nothing is left undone.’ The sun doesn’t decide to shine; the rain doesn’t intend to fall. They simply follow their nature. When we align with this same spontaneity, our actions become as inevitable and effortless as breathing
Stephen Mitchell, The Way of Effortless Action: Wu Wei in Zen and Taoism
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination.
Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Anaïs Nin
The news is dominated by heatwaves in Europe, something Ireland is immune to…
Traveler: What kind of weather are we going to have today?
Shepherd: The kind of weather I like
Traveler: How do you know it will be the kind of weather you like?
Shepherd: Having found out, sir, I cannot always get what I like, I have learned always to like what I get. So I am quite sure we will have the kind of weather I like.
Anthony de Mello, sj, The Heart of the Enlightened: A Book of Story Mediatations
Ajahn Sumedho advises: ‘Don’t take your life personally.’
That sounds disorienting, and it is: but what replaces the solid isolated self is respect for the sensitivity and clarity with respect to the boundless heart – that we all can have access to. This sense, this awakening to citta, can widen one’s cosmos and give it balance: my feelings, my rights, my time, and my opinions have to be felt through the heart, but they don’t have to be such an exclusive concern.
Ajahn Sucitto
Mindfulbalance 