You may not control all events that happen to you
but you can decide not to be reduced by them
Maya Angelou
photo bart everson
Tag: Mindfulness
Why meditation helps
Meditation is the discovery
that the point of life is always arrived at
in the immediate moment.
Alan Watts
with thanks again to Ellen for the beautiful autumn photo
An act of hospitality
Mindfulness is an act of hospitality.
A way of learning to treat ourselves with kindness and care that slowly begins to percolate into the deepest recesses of our being while gradually offering us the possibility of relating to others in the same manner. Working with whatever is present is enough. There is no need to condemn ourselves for not feeling loving or kind. Rather, the process simply asks us to entertain the possibility of offering hospitality to ourselves no matter what we are feeling or thinking.
This week try taking some time to explore the possibility of sitting with yourself as if you were your own best friend.
Saki Santorelli, Befriending Self
photo Carriec
Sunday Quote: Movement
The deepest words of the wise…teach us…
the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows
or the sound of the water when it is flowing
Antonio Marchado
photo of the Allondon river near Crozet, France.
Holding both efforts
Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning,
that without listening speaking no longer heals,
that without distance closeness cannot cure.
Henri Nouwen
A way of direct experience
The way that can be spoken is not the eternal way
That which can be named is not the eternal name
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 1
“Talking about a path is not walking that path.
Thinking about life is not living“.
Directly experiencing life is not something we do easily. By the time we are adults, our experience is mediated through a multitude of conceptual filters that provide a constant commentary about our life, but that ignore the thing itself. This process is so deeply conditioned in most of us that we don’t even notice it. We wander through day after day with our minds spinning an endless stream of thoughts, judgments, hopes, fantasies, critiques, and plans, all mixed with a babble of advertising jingles and fragments of television shows. Lao-tzu suggests that this habitual commentary on life, though a natural part of being human, is not the same thing as a fully lived life. At the same time, he does not totally discount the conceptual thinking process. We make a certain kind of sense out of our life through the use of categories, thoughts, and words. But, he suggests … these thoughts and words are gateways to life, not life itself.
Commentary on the Tao Te Ching by William Martin in A Path and A Practice
photo: without you
