How we live our moments

Like it or not,

this moment is all we really have ot work with

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Set your mind

At every moment, we always have a choice,

even if it feels as if we don’t.

Sometimes that choice may simply be to think a more positive thought.

Tina Turner, American singer, 1939 – May 24, 2023

Holding on and letting go

Letting go is about carefully revealing assumptions, biases, and life messages (‘There’s something wrong with me, I’m unworthy’) and releasing them.

You can liken the process to a gradual descent out of the tumult and the gridlock of your personal world into the free space of the unconditioned. It’s rather like lowering oneself down a rope. You have to know how to do that. It is a matter of holding on to something you trust, even though it seems like a thin strand, then letting go a little bit and trusting the downward pull.

Ajahn Sucitto

Let things pass.

As a new month is about to begin….

If I had to sum up [meditation] practice in three words, without hesitation, I’d go for “Let things pass.”

In the midst of chaos or deep in one’s inner battlefields, dare to make the experiment of not controlling, of dropping the self. It’s mayhem, but there’s no problem! Far from giving up and far from resignation, letting things pass means distinguishing between the psychodramas (the problems created by conceptual mind) and the genuine tragedies of existence, which call for solidarity, commitment, and perseverance.

Meditating is stripping down, daring to live nakedly in order to give oneself, contributing to the welfare of the world, giving one’s share. Why don’t we look at the day that lies ahead of us not as a store where we can acquire things, but as a clinic, a dispensary of the soul, where together we can recover and advance?

Alexandre Jollien, 1975 – Swiss philosopher and writer

Reflect constantly

Watch the stars in their courses as though you were accompanying them,

and reflect constantly on the changing of the elements into one another. 

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.47

At home

Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn’t the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that’s actually the easy part. The hard part is what’s right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life. The hard part is learning not just how to be but mastering the nearly impossible art of how to be at home.

Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House