Everyone’s mind likes saying “but.”
Thinking you are doing it wrong, that the conditions of your life stop you from making friends with yourself – these thoughts might get in the way of noticing what it is like to be you. You might disapprove of who you are, but disapproving is just another way of not being here.
In this case, making friends with yourself could mean lowering your standards….
John Tarrant, What’s it Like to be You?
photo Ian Kirk
Wherever you are, just try being the host.
You will always be at home.
Linji Yixuan, Chan Buddhist, died 866
There is an inner wakefulness…
that will eventually
startle us back
to the truth of
who we are.
Rumi
If you ask someone who is swimming in water, ‘What is water like?’, then they simply bring attention to it and say, ‘Well, it feels like this. It’s this way.’ Then you ask, ‘How is it exactly? Is it wet or cold or warm or hot…?’ All of these words can describe it. Water can be cold, warm, hot, pleasant, unpleasant… But it’s just like this. The realm we’re swimming in for a lifetime is this way! It feels like this! You feel it! Sometimes it’s pleasant. Sometimes it’s unpleasant. Most of the time it’s neither pleasant nor unpleasant. But always it’s just this way. Things come and go and change, and there’s nothing that you can depend on as being totally stable. [It’s] all energy and change and movement; all flux and flow.
Now we’re not judging it; we’re not saying it’s good or it’s bad, or you should like it, or you shouldn’t; we’re just bringing attention to it – like the water.
Ajahn Sumedho
Accept – then act.
Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.
Always work with it, not against it
Eckhart Tolle
photo pygarcia
