Tag: Mindfulness

Step back

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Whenever we step away from emotional reactivity, a confining narrative or our filtering concepts, and relate directly to what is present in the here and now, we are taking the backward step.

Give up a practice based on intellectual understanding – searching for phrases and chasing after words.

Take the backward step and turn the light inward.

Your body-mind of itself will drop away, and your original face will appear. If you want to attain just this, immediately practice just this.

Dogen, 1200 – 1253, Fukanzazengi

As we are

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When Zen Master Joshu was a young monk he asked his teacher Nansen, “What is the Way?” His teacher replied “Your Ordinary Mind is the Way”. By “ordinary” Nansen meant the mind Joshu already had; he didn’t need to turn it, or himself, into something else. He didn’t need to put, as the Zen saying goes, another head on top of the one he already had.

Unfortunately, these days, when we hear the word ordinary, we are inclined to think it means “average or typical” or even “mediocre”. We contrast ordinary with special, and decide, given the choice, we rather be special. But our practice wont make us special; it will keep bringing us back to who we already are.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness

Sunday Quote: Veiled

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Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.

Haruki Murakami

Returning

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After the cold and the storms, bright Spring-like days in Ireland for the weekend.

And if you missed a day, there was always the next,
and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter,
the hills weren’t going anywhere,
the thyme and rosemary kept coming back,
the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit.

Louise Gluck, Sunrise [extract]

Our journey

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And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.

Wendell Berry.

Our true home

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Five hundred of Rumi’s odes conclude with khamush, silence.

Rumi is less interested in language, more attuned to the sources of it.….Rumi has a whole theory of language based on the reed flute (ney). Beneath everything we say, and within each note of the reed flute, lies a nostalgia for the reed bed. Language and music are possible only because we’re empty, hollow, and separated from the source. All language is a longing for home.

Colman Barks, On Silence