Tag: Mindfulness

Many directions

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When we live superficially, we are always outside ourselves, never quite ‘with’ ourselves, always divided and pulled in many directions –  we find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we do not really mean, needing things we do not really need, exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and without meaning in our lives. “Why spend your money on what is not food and your earnings on what fails to satisfy?” (Isaiah 55)

Thomas Merton, Love and Living

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Sunday Quote: Can we just be?

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cow2Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something.

All your life you have been going after something, pursuing some goal.

Enlightenment is dropping all that.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Give up comparing

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Everyone should sit firmly anchored in the place

where there is no better and worse.

Kodo Sawaki, 1880 – 1965, Japanese Sōtō Zen teacher

At the door

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door

In practicing equanimity, we train in widening our circle of understanding and compassion to include the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. It is more a matter of being fully engaged with whatever comes to our door. We could call it being completely alive. Training in equanimity requires that we leave behind some baggage: the comfort of rejecting whole parts of our experience, for example and the security of welcoming only what is pleasant. The courage to continue with this unfolding process comes from self-compassion and from giving ourselves plenty of time. If we continue to practice this way over the months and years, we will feel our hearts and minds grow bigger. When people ask me how long this will take, I say, “At least until you die.”

Pema Chodron,  The places that scare you

The limitations of our labels

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The Real …expects nothing of speech

Le réel …n’attend rien de la parole.

Jacques Lacan, French Psychoanalyst,  Ecrits

Believing our story

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Part of waking up is becoming sensitive to how we become discouraged, how we close down, and where we go for false comfort.  To wake up is to become aware of the tendency to judge ourselves, to take our failures personally, to fall into despair, self-pity, depression, frustration, anger, or wherever we tend to go when we believe the story that we are a person who can’t do it right.  Seeing all of this is enough.  Awareness is its own action.  We don’t need to analyze it or impose changes based on our ideas of what should be happening.  Just being awake to the present moment, as it is, and seeing clearly what is happening:  this is transformative.  We are simply awake here and now.

Joan Tollifson, Nothing to Grasp