Tag: Mindfulness

Know how to be happy

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I like this idea of over-borrowing, always demanding more from the present moment.

If you know how to be happy with the wonders of life that are already there for you to enjoy, you don’t need to stress your mind and your body by striving harder and harder, and you don’t need to stress this planet by purchasing more and more stuff. The Earth belongs to our children. We have already borrowed too much from it…..Much of our modern way of life is permeated by mindless over-borrowing. The more we borrow, the more we lose. That’s why it’s critical that we wake up and see we don’t need to do that anymore. What’s already available in the here and now is plenty for us to be nourished, to be happy.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Sunday quote: No preference

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Awareness is the silent and choiceless observation of what is.

Jiddu Krisnamurti

Aligned with nature

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Pass through this brief life in accordance with nature…

Gladly…like an olive that ripens and falls…

grateful to the tree that it grew on.

Marcus Aurelius Meditations 4,48

Open the mind and heart

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We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.

So the challenge is to notice the emotional tug of shenpa when it arises and to stay with it for one and a half minutes without the storyline. Can you do this once a day, or many times throughout the day, as the feeling arises? This is the challenge. This is the process of unmasking, letting go, opening the mind and heart.

Pema Chödrön

Interesting

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In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.

John Cage, quoted in Mark Epstein, Going on Being

Let go

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Try to go a whole seven days without having to control everything, without stressing when things don’t work out as you thought they would or should. As you do this, any time you feel the need to take charge, try to relax out of it, just to see what happens. Look for the good that happened precisely because things didn’t work out the way you thought they would or should.

And take your time. There really is no desperate hurry. When we constantly pursue perfection, our life speeds up. We make hasty decisions and snap judgments…. You’ll likely feel relived, and make better choices.

Beth Kempton, Wabi Sabi: Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect life