Our life is a constant journey, from birth to death. The landscape changes, the people change, our needs change, but the train keeps moving.
Life is the train, not the station.
Paulo Coelho
A constant journey
Tag: Mindfulness
Grounded
While sitting on the floor of a room in Japan and looking out on a small garden with flowers blooming and dragon flies hovering in space, I sensed that this small world, almost underfoot, shall I say, had a validity all its own, but must be realized and appreciated from its own level in space.
I suddenly felt I had too long been exclusively above my boots.
Mark George Tobey, 1890 – 1976, American painted, strongly influenced by Asian calligraphy.
Now
There is one simple thing wrong with you – you think you have plenty of time….If you don’t think your life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for?
Why the hesitation to change?
Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan
The Choice
As we look forward to starting another month …
To dare is to lose one’s footing temporarily;
to not dare, is to lose one’s life
Søren Kierkegaard
Not adding more
Not adding to our inevitable difficulties by lamenting, resisting, feeling sorry for ourselves, or making them into the story of our lives. One of the Buddhas most useful teachings: how we speak to ourselves about our challenges reduces our suffering.
Now a well-instructed person, when touched with a feeling of pain, does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. So he feels one pain: physical, but not mental. As they are touched by that painful feeling, they are not resistant. No resistance-obsession with regard to that painful feeling consumes them.
Just as if they were to shoot a person with an arrow and, right afterward, did not shoot them with another one, so that they would feel the pain of only one arrow. In the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the well-instructed person does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. They feels one pain: physical, but not mental
Their accepting or rejecting are scattered, gone to their end, do not exist. Knowing the dustless, sorrowless state, they discern rightly, are beyond becoming, have gone to the Further Shore.
The Buddha, The Sallatha Sutta
Stay Alert
Nobody said it was easy, to stay in the fire, stay alert, and forebear.
But the alternative is to suffer what is, anyway,
but with no true or reliable relationship with it
Susan Murphy, Upside-Down Zen
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