Tag: Mindfulness

Not getting burnt

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A fire reflected in a lake cannot burn the water. Neither can emotions disturb the mind when you don’t get involved in them. Don’t identify an emotion as your self. The fear or anger is not you, only an impersonal phenomenon.

Mentally pull back from the emotion and turn your awareness around to observe it. When in the grip of negative emotion we tend to believe it will never end. But emotions are no more permanent than thoughts.

Cynthia Thatcher, Just Seeing: Insight Mediation and Sense-Perception

Sunday Quote: Wholeness

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Non est vivere, sed valere vita est

Life is not just a matter of being alive, but living well

Martial, Roman Poet, c 40 – 102 AD, Epigrams Book VI, 70:15)

The windblown clouds

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No matter how long you live,
the result is not altered.
Who will not end up as a skeleton?
Cast off the notion that “I exist.”

Entrust yourself to the windblown clouds,
and do not wish to live forever.

Ikkyu, Japanese Zen Buddhist monk and poet.1394 – 1481

Our chance selves

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For intervals, then, throughout our lives
we savor a concurrence, the great blending
of our chance selves with what sustains
all chance.

We ride the wave and are
the wave.

And with renewed belief
inner and outer we find our talk
turned to prayer, our prayer into truth:
for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.

William Stafford

The paths we choose

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As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

Thoreau

Our astonished emotions

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It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.

Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.

That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its inner most chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream.

Rilke, Letters to a Yong Poet