Tag: Mindfulness

True freedom is related to absolute trust

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It is hard to find better guidance than this. Knowing it deep down would be so nice: to be without anxiety about my imperfections or messy reality or about what is not fully achieved in my life:

One thing, all things,  they move and intermingle without distinction.

To live in this realization

is to be without anxiety about imperfection.

The mind of absolute trust is beyond all thought, all striving,

is perfectly at peace,  for in it there is no yesterday, no today, no tomorrow.

Seng T’san, 7th Century Zen Patriarch,  Hsin Hsin Ming

Don’t invite them to stay

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Not only is life always in movement, but the mind is also.

So, in meditation as in life, how to deal with negative thoughts and difficult feeling states…

In zazen [meditation], leave your front door and your back door open.

Let thoughts come and go.

Just don’t serve them tea.

Shunryu Suzuki

The wisdom of never being secure

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One of the foundations of wisdom is to see that things are always changing, and changing in ways that we do not expect. The weather we are having these “Summer” days helps – showers, followed by sun, followed today by longer spells of rain:

It must be obvious..

that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe

whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

A new month: thresholds

Karl Duffy1 Comment

At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would enable me to do it? A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms, and atmospheres.

John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us 

Being at ease with the messiness of life

Karl Duffy1 Comment

With mindfulness practice, you learn to see how the untrained mind is agitated by the human condition and how not to allow this general anxiety to fuel your fear in a specific situation. You also gain tolerance for the unpleasantness of uncertainty and also the naturalness of your own imperfection. You have confidence that “life is like this.” You cannot and are not supposed to miraculously fix it; rather, you gain the insight that happiness and peace come from relating to life just as it is.

Philipp Moffit, Freedom from Fear

Sunday Quote: rest

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Take rest;

a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop

Da requiem; requietus ager bene credita reddit 

Ovid