Tag: Meditation

What seems solid

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hook head

It is in running away from our “monsters” that we make them seem so solid. Whatever we resist exerts a strong hold on us: in solidifying it, we empower it to stay in our mind and our life. But when we cultivate the willingness to be with life just as it is, our relationship to what we’ve avoided starts to change. Once we see through the solidity of our resistance, our lives become more fluid and workable. We’re able to move beyond where we were once stuck. Even if we don’t like our life as it is, we don’t need to wage war against it. We can start meeting our resistance squarely by noticing all of the ways in which we avoid the present moment, the ways in which we avoid practice, the ways in which we resist what is. Understanding the depth of our resistance is of major importance in furthering our practice.

Ezra Bayda, Breaking Through

Creating a gap

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File:Young Robin (7521159482).jpg

It isn’t the things that happen to us that cause us to suffer;

it’s how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.

Pema Chödrön

photo of a robin sheltering from the wind and the rain by phil sangwell

Familiar stories

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photo

We can have a lot of stories about how our lives are heading, or what our strengths and weaknesses are, or why things are not going as the should go…

One of the most beautifully disturbing questions we can ask, is whether a given story we tell about our lives is actually true, and whether the opinions we go over every day have any foundation or are things we repeat to ourselves simply so that we will continue to play the game.  It can be quite disorientating to find that a story we have relied on is not only not true – it never was true…In fact, the continued retelling of it simply imprisons us. We are used to the prison,  however, we have indeed fitted cushions and armchairs and made it comfortable and have locked the door from the inside.

David Whyte, Letter from the House, Winter 2012

Sunday Quote: Spontaneity

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wild flowers 33

We need the tonic of wildness

Thoreau

We never really arrive

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File:Atsinanana.jpg

Some people want it pure white

but sweep as you may,

you can’t empty the mind

Keizan Jokin, 1268 – 1325, second founder of Soto Zen

 photo gloumouth1

Always needing something

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File:Cairn-Terrier-Garten2.jpg

What we sense as self is always changing and unsatisfactory. The sense of self always has to have something or do something. It wants to be approved of by somebody, or be busy winning at something, or be analysing itself or trying to wipe itself out. It is always orbiting around some need or another. There’s the need to know something, or have an opinion; or the need to feel one’s doing good enough; the need to feel that one is useful; the need to feel that other people like me. The need to be the same as everyone else. Or the need to be different from everyone else. Or, different on some days, the same on other days. And the need to be able to change from being same to being different when I need to. And so on – it never really settles.

Ajahn Sucitto, Good Enough

photo ketterechts