When we wake up in bed on Monday morning and think of the various hurdles we’ve got to jump that day, immediately we feel sad.
Bored and bothered.
Whereas actually we’re just lying in bed.
Alan Watts
photo christoper michel
Tag: Meditation
Sunday Quote: Change
To be interested in the changing seasons
is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana
Forgetting ourselves
No despair of ours can alter the reality of things,
or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.
Indeed we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us,
for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget
ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the
general dance.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
A simple practice
Driving is a daily task in this society. I am not suggesting that you stop driving, just that you do it consciously. While we are driving, we think only about arriving. Therefore, every time that we see a red light, we are not very happy. The red light is a kind on enemy that prevents us from attaining our goal. But we can also see the red light as a bell of mindfulness, reminding us to return to the present moment…. It is easy to transform a feeling of irritation into a pleasant feeling. Although it is the same red light, it becomes different. It becomes a friend, helping us to remember that it is only in the present moment that we can live our lives…
The next time you are caught in a traffic jam, don’t fight it. It’s useless to fight. Sit back and smile to yourself. Enjoy the present moment, breathing and smiling, and make the other people in your car happy. Happiness is there if you know how to breathe and smile, because happiness can always be found in the present moment. Practicing meditation is to go back to the present moment to encounter the flower, the blue sky, the child. Happiness is available.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step.
Stepping back from the program
Our 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.
But our sense of self is just a series or programs – isn’t it good to know that that self is not you! It’s the same for everyone; they all have a variation on the same themes. It’s just that when the programmable mind is immersed in the scenario of competition and performance and achievement – all of which have no satisfaction in them – it gets programmed into the unsatisfactory. However we can witness these programs and step back from them. The self-programs can be short-circuited by seeing them clearly for what they are and emotionally staying cool and non-reactive to them.
Ajahn Sucitto, Good Enough
photo of mosaic at the Cathedral of Sant’Eufemia by Wolfgang Sauber
How we look
It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves.
The least of things with a meaning is always worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: The practice of psychotherapy
