Tag: Mindfulness

It starts with you

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Only one of our relationships is truly lifelong, from our first breath to our last. The one we have with ourselves. Imagine if it was characterised by compassion and warmth. By an ability to forgive, to forget our little missteps. Imagine if we could look at ourselves with gentle, kind eyes and view our faults with a sense of humour. Imagine if we could give ourselves the same loving care we give our children or other people we love without reservation. It would do us a world of good. And the divine emotions in us would thrive.

from this nice, heartfelt book which I am just finishing – Bjorn Natthiko Lindeblad, I May be Wrong, and other wisdoms from life as a Forest Monk.

You are the medicine

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Cure yourself with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon.
With the sound of the river and the waterfall.
With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds.

Put love in tea instead of sugar, and take it looking at the stars. Heal yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs of the rain .Get strong with bare feet on the ground and with everything that is born from it.

Get smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with the eye of your forehead. Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier.

Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember: you are the medicine.

María Sabina Magdalena García, 1894 – 1985, Mexican shaman and poet.

Not the conditions

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The mind exists in a state of “not enough” and so is always greedy for more. Boredom means the mind is hungry for more stimulus, more food for thought, and its hunger is not being satisfied. If you can stay bored and restless and observe what it feels like to be bored and restless, you bring awareness to the feeling and there is suddenly some space and stillness around it. So even boredom can teach you who you are and who you are not. You discover that a “bored person” is not who you are.

Boredom is simply a conditioned energy movement within you. Neither are you an angry, sad, or fearful person. Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not “yours”, not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you. “I am bored.” Who knows this? “I am angry, sad, afraid.” Who knows this? You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.

Eckhart Tolle

Every moment

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Recognizing and welcoming what is here in front of us, instead of always waiting for things to be “better” than the situation we are actually in:

The mind and external conditions are just as they are (“such”).

The gate of liberation is open.

Dogen, 1200-1253, founder of the Soto branch of Zen Buddhism, Commentary on the Precepts

Our natural home

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The more I remove myself from nature and the more I increase my availability to the modern world, the more restless I become. I am no scientist and realize that I may be mistaken, but my experience is that feelings of insecurity, loneliness and depression to a large extent stem from the flattening of the world that occurs when we are alienated from nature. There is, of course, a lot to be said in favour of man-made environments and new technology, but our eyes, nose, ears, tongue, skin, brain, hands and feet were not created for choosing the road of least resistance.

Mother Nature is 4.54 billion years old, so it seems to me arrogant when we don’t listen to nature and instead blindly place our trust in human invention.

Erlinge Kagge, Philosophy for Polar Explorers

Not in charge

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This is not your week to run the Universe.

Next week is not looking so good either.

Susan J. Elliott