When filled with qi, the body is like a tree branch filled with sap; it can bend and flow with the breeze, but it does not snap or lose its connection with the root. On the other hand, a stiff, dead branch is easily broken. Thus the adage of Lao Zi, “Concentrate the qi and you will achieve the utmost suppleness…
Suppleness is the essence of life“
Kenneth S. Cohen, The Way of Qigong
In the West, many of us can live in physical comfort, yet, because we are continually being presented with more refined commodities or changing standards by which to measure ourselves, there is not much contentment.
People can become depressed if their bodies don’t match up to the current standards of beauty, or if their personality is not smart enough – whatever the current fashion is. So there can be a nervous feeling of inadequacy and insecurity which deprives us of a sense of trust in our innate worth as a human being.
So because of just this , its important that we sense and define ourselves as “being” apart from those currents, if only to get onto some firmer ground...what really helps is to be able to calm and collect the mind …How you attend creates the dwelling place of the mind.
Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma
Our continual mistake is that we do not concentrate upon the present day, the actual hour, of our life; we live in the past or the future;
We are continually expecting the coming of some special hour when our life shall unfold itself in its full significance.
And we do not observe that life is flowing like water through our fingers, sifting like precious grains from a loosely fastened bag.
Alexander Elchaninov, 1881 – 1943, Russian Orthodox priest
It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living.
Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
True mastery can be gained
by letting things go their own way.
Byron Katie, Stephen Mitchell, A Thousand Names For Joy: How To Live In Harmony With The Way Things Are
a new month begins…
imagine! imagine!
The wild and wondrous journeys
still to be ours
Mary Oliver, Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me [extract]
Mindfulbalance 