Tag: Mindfulness

A cold wind

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I pause in my gardening to look at a bird overhead whose cry has broken the silence. A refreshing wind….dries the sweat on my brow. Joy in life, joy in work, wells up in me.

“The wind is cold today, isn’t it” comments an elderly woman passing by. Does one feel the breeze as refreshing or as a heartlessly cold wind? The difference lies not in the wind but in the person perceiving it

Centuries ago, when Chao-chou asked Zen Master Nan-chuan if he should seek the Way, Nan-chuan answered, “If you try for it, you will become separated from it”

That which we call paradise or happiness…cannot be sought outside us. It will be found only when we notice that we are inherently endowed with it.

Shundo Aoyama, Zen Seeds

Appreciate the moments

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You should be experiencing the life that happening to you,

Not the one you wish was happening.

Don’t waste a moment of life trying to make other things happen;

Appreciate the moments you are given

Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul

Sunday Quote: Our armour

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Adopting a defensive position towards life can often mean we do not notice the nice things offered each day.

Even the general

took off his armour

to gaze at our peonies

Kikaku, Japanese Haiku poet, 1661 – 1707

Remember

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November, and especially today, the Feast of All Souls, was traditionally in Ireland a time for remembering those who have gone before us.

Carlos Casteneda was once asked how we could make our lives more spiritual, and he said: “Just remember that everyone you encounter today, everyone you see, will someday have to die”

He’s right. That knowledge changes our whole relationship to people

Larry Rosenberg

different ways

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All Saints Day

There is the heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.

Mary Oliver, Yellow [extract]

The dramas of our lives

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A repost, for the night that is in it.

We create big problems for ourselves by not recognizing mind energies when they arrive dressed up in stories. They are like the neighbor’s children disguised as Halloween ghosts. When we open the door and find the child next door dressed in a sheet, even though it looks like a ghost, we remember it is simply the child next door. And when I remember the dramas of my life are the energies of the mind dressed in the sheet of a story, I manage them more gracefully.

I think this is what people mean when they say, “We create our own reality.” I used to have trouble with that idea when I first heard it in the seventies. Hard as I try, I cannot create the reality of the sun rising tomorrow in the west, and I cannot create the reality of the people I know with illnesses being miraculously cured. But one reality I can create – the point of view I bring to any experience

Sylvia Boorstein, It’s Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness