Tag: Meditation

Making time to nourish ourselves

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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What is balance in a society whose skewing of time has it totally off-balance? What is balance in a culture that has destroyed the night with perpetual light and keeps equipment going twenty-four hours a day because it is more costly to turn machines on and of than it is to pay people to run them at strange and difficult hours? In the first place balance for us is obviously not a mathematical division of the day. For most of us our days simply do not divide that easily. In the second place, balance for us is clearly not equivalence. Because I have done forty hours of work this week doesn’t mean that I will have forty hours of prayer and leisure. What it does mean, however, is that somehow I must make time for both. I must make time or die inside.

Joan Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

photo:guido gerding

Holding it all

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What if you are already complete? What if it were possible to hold the whole of it in awareness and allow it to be just as it already is. That would be an incredibly radical act and it would be an act of profound wisdom […] But actually investigate the way things actually are, and you might find that inside of the sadness, the grief, the despair lies something else too — lies some kind of beauty, some kind of humanity, some kind of human understanding, that understands that things are impermanent, that nothing stays the same, that there is loss, that it is not possible to control the whole universe, that even in terms of our body, this is something that is to a large extent a mystery — but it’s not all ugly, it’s not all black. Even in the midst of utter darkness, there’s this other element of beauty, of symmetry, of the natural world.

Jon Kabat Zinn.

When concepts get in the way

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Buzzard

Your notions of happiness may be very dangerous. Happiness can only be possible in the here and now. Go back and examine deeply your notions and ideas of happiness. So let go of what you believed yesterday. Let go of what you thought last week you needed to be happy. The conditions of happiness that are in your life now are enough.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Having ideas about ourself

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Whatever assumptions you have about yourself, no matter how reasonable they might be, they are still a creation in the present. By believing in them, by thinking and holding to them, you’re continually creating yourself as a personality. Awakeness is not a creation

Ajahn Sumedho

Inside and out

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open-window

As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found – in himself.

Erich Fromm

A hidden beauty

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…You come, dreaming of ferns and flowers

and new leaves unfolding

upon the brash turnip-hearted skunk cabbage…

…Your kneel beside it. The smell

is lurid and flows in the most

unabashed way…

…but these are the woods you love,

where the secret name

of every death is life again – a miracle…

…What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.

Mary Oliver, Skunk Cabbage