At any moment you have a choice
that either leads you closer to your spirit
or further away from it
Thich Nhat Hanh
Tag: Meditation
Difficult moments as our teachers
[If] we truly want to progress on the path, we must regard our enemies as our best teachers. For whoever holds love and compassion in high esteem, the practice of tolerance is essential, and it requires an enemy. We must be grateful to our enemies, then, because they help us best engender a serene mind! Anger and hatred are the real enemies that we must confront and defeat, not the “enemies” who appear from time to time in our lives.
The Dalai Lama
Saturday winding down
The first condition [required] is peace and calm; without that, it’s very difficult to see anything. That’s why a lot of our practice is actually to bring the heart to a state of balance and calm. Most people are in a constant state of reactivity. But someone who has seen the suffering of reactivity calmly comes to realize that it’s not the best way to relate to life; it is very limited – always the experience of ‘Self’, ‘Me’ and ‘You’. But as the sense of ‘Self’ decreases, the reactivity decreases also. It’s not so much the sense of Self that is the obstacle, its our identification with it.
Ajahn Sundara, Simplicity
photo jeff chenqinyi
Fixated
There are actually two reasons why people in general are out of touch with their subjective experiences: They have ‘low definition’ bodies and they are continuously fixated in thought, especially verbal thought. Of course, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with thinking. Indeed complex thought is evolution’s wonderful gift to humankind, giving our species special powers that the others lack. Thought per se is not the problem. The problem is the driven and fixated way in which we think.
Shinzen Young, Bringing the Monastery Home
Out of touch with ourselves
With our cell phones and PDA’s we are now able to be in touch with anyone and everyone at any time.
In the process, we run the risk of never being in touch with ourselves.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Photo theeerin
Simplifying our activities
Mindfulness meditation helps us work against the fragmentation which is a by-product of the modern world, with its speed, constant demands, and abundance of stimuli. We practice in slowing down and simplifying life in order to be able to savour it more deeply. We drop into a natural goodness by letting go of the chatter of the mind and judgmental thoughts.
Sitting [in meditation] is essentially simplifying space. Our daily lives are in constant movement: lots of things going on, lots of people talking, lots of events taking place. In the middle of that, it’s very difficult to sense what we are in our life. When we simplify the situation, when we take away the externals and remove ourselves from the ringing phone, the television, the people who visit us, the dog who needs a walk, we get a chance to face ourselves.
Charlotte Joko Beck
photo Doolin, Co Clare, Nicola Mondinelli
