Happiness happens when you fit with your life, when you fit so harmoniously that whatsoever you are doing is your joy. Then suddenly you will come to know: meditation follows you. If you love the work that you are doing, if you love the way you are living, then you are meditative.
Osho
To be rooted
is perhaps the most important and least recognized need
of the human soul.
Simone Weil, French Philosopher, 1909 – 1943
Contrary to most professional opinion, a gnawing dissatisfaction with life is not a sign of “mental illness,” nor an indication of poor social adjustment, nor a character disorder. For concealed within this basic unhappiness with life and existence is the embryo of a growing intelligence, a special intelligence usually buried under the immense weight of social shams. A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities. For suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality and forces us to become alive in a special sense – to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves and our worlds in ways we have heretofore avoided.
Ken Wilbur, No Boundary
Every day of your life, every morning of your life, you could ask yourself, “As I go into this day, what is the most important thing? What is the best use of this day?” At my age, it’s kind of scary when I go to bed at night and I look back at the day, and it seems like it passed in the snap of a finger. That was a whole day? What did I do with it? Did I move any closer to being more compassionate, loving, and caring — to being fully awake? Is my mind more open? What did I actually do? I feel how little time there is and how important it is how we spend our time. What is the best use of each day of our lives? In one very short day, each of us could become more sane, more compassionate, more tender, more in touch with the dream-like quality of reality. Or we could bury all these qualities and get more in touch with solid mind, retreating more into our own cocoon.
Pema Chodron, Waking up to your World
photo of sun rising over the Corrib river, Galway, by tom murphy
One of my meditation teachers used to end each of our interviews … and say to me, “Remember, Sylvia, be happy.” I actually for a long time thought it was a salutation, like “have a good day” or something that you say just in a routine kind of a way, and it took me a long time to realize that it was an instruction, “Be happy.” Not only that it was an instruction but that it was a wisdom transmission – that happiness was a possibility. I understand that happiness to mean, the happiness of a mind that’s alert, that’s awake to the amazing potential of being a person in a life, with a mind that’s opened, that sees everything that’s going on, and realizes what an amazing possibility this is, and with a heart that’s open, the heart that responds naturally as hearts do, in compassion, in connection with friendliness, with love, with consolation when it needs to: That that’s the happiness of life – a mind that’s awake, a heart that’s engaged.
Sylvia Boorstein, Stanford Keynote Speech, 2005
photo joe sarembe
De temps en temps,
il est bon de faire une pause dans notre quête du bonheur et juste être heureux.
Now and then
it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness
and just be happy.
Guillaume Apollinaire, French poet, 1880 – 1918
photp ingrid taylar
