Always needing something

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What we sense as self is always changing and unsatisfactory. The sense of self always has to have something or do something. It wants to be approved of by somebody, or be busy winning at something, or be analysing itself or trying to wipe itself out. It is always orbiting around some need or another. There’s the need to know something, or have an opinion; or the need to feel one’s doing good enough; the need to feel that one is useful; the need to feel that other people like me. The need to be the same as everyone else. Or the need to be different from everyone else. Or, different on some days, the same on other days. And the need to be able to change from being same to being different when I need to. And so on – it never really settles.

Ajahn Sucitto, Good Enough

photo ketterechts

What gives us energy

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The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon.

We are never tired,

so long as we can see far enough.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

photo from the top of Skellig Michael by mike shields

Just the way it is

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Something we need to hold in mind at all times...

If you are invested in security and certainty

you are on the wrong planet

Pema Chodron

Sunday Quote: Impermanence

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A self that goes on changing

is a self that goes on living

Virginia Wolff

Leaning too far forward

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Don’t prolong the past,

don’t invite the future,

don’t be deceived by appearances,

just dwell in present awareness.

Patrul Rinpoche

photo ian paterson

Being just in the now and not in time

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I was at an event yesterday where a speaker said that a certain tribe in the Amazon have no concept of time, no words for “week” or “month”. Strange, since we allow these ideas exert such pressure on us. They, on the contrary, do not think of time as a “thing”, or understand the idea of “I haven’t got the time”, racing against the clock to get something completed.  This allows them to relate differently to the moment; they are not persecuted by an idea of a perfect moment, or relate to it just through the thinking faculty; they are grounded in the now, no matter how it is:

If your relationship to the present moment is not right,

nothing can ever be right in the future,

because when the future comes,

it’s the present moment.

Eckhart Tolle

photo arjan richter