Magic all around

There’s always a lot of magic, but our way of seeing it is very small and we mostly just call it Nature.

Why, we are not at all surprised that we can pick up an apple in autumn that was a pink flower in the spring.

That’s natural magic and we don’t really notice it.

Pat O’Shea, 1931 – 2007, Irish children’s fiction writer, The Hounds of the Mórrígan

Stop talking to yourself

If you aren’t feeding the fire of anger or the fire of craving by talking to yourself, then the fire doesn’t have anything to feed on.

It peaks and passes on.

In order to be gentle and create an atmosphere of compassion for yourself, it’s necessary to stop talking to yourself about how wrong everything is – or how right everything is, for that matter.
 

Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are – a Guide to Compassionate Living

Where you stand

How refreshingly bright is the moon of the Fourfold Wisdom!

Being so, is there anything you lack as the absolute presents itself before you?

The place where you stand is the Land of the Lotus,
And your person — the body of the Buddha.

Hakuin, Japanese Zen poet, 1686 – 1768.

Sufficient meaning

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon.

Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears

Jung, Autobiography

Remember today

Much of what you see “out there” is actually manufactured “in here” by your brain

Only a small fraction of the input to your occipital lobes comes from the external world;

the rest comes from internal memory stores and perceptual-processing modules.

Rich Hanson, Buddha’s Brain

Sunday Quote: Power

The most common way people give up their power,

is by thinking they don’t have any.

Alice Walker