The moment at which a feeling of pleasure or pain begins to turn into a disturbing emotion is the point at which meditative awareness can be most effective. Before we describe or explain feelings to ourselves, how do they feel? What do we actually experience before we name them and are caught by them? Meditative awareness helps us to know and come into contact with that basic aspect of our experience of feeling.
Martine Bachelor
Every particle of creation sings its own song of what is and what is not.
Hearing what is can make you wise.
Hearing what is not can drive you mad
Ghalib, Persian Poet, 1797 – 1869
Love means to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart, without knowing it, from various ills –
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend
Czesław Miłosz, Polish poet
Joy is
being willing for things to be
as they are
Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special
Our lives suffer from a lack of meaning that disguises itself as consumerism and a host of other addictions. Having lost our spiritual grounding […] we experience our groundlessness as an unbearable lightness of being. The tragic dialectic between security and freedom reasserts itself: having attained some measure of self-determination and confronted the lack at its core, we now crave the grounding that would connect our own aspirations with something greater than ourselves.
David Loy, A Buddhist History of the West
