There is not one little blade of grass,
there is no colour in this world
that is not intended to make men rejoice.
John Calvin
Tag: Mindfulness
Balance, rooted in the body
Healing is a natural result of finding true balance.
If we relate to a balanced ease in the body, it brings us into the balance of our minds, and it is only from that basis that we can get a feel, through the tangle of anxieties and mood swings, of a simple thread of emotional ease and psychological space. It’s a shift from being tense or on guard, to something more trusting. And it’s through attending to this that we can step back from the biases and old narratives.
Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma
An unobserved life
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
Eric Hoffer, American moral and social philosopher.
Just simply being fully present
While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance, that might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that’s precisely the point. the fact that I am standing there and washing the dishes is a wondrous reality. I’m being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There’s no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.
Thich Nhat Hanh
photo: Ataraxes
Seeing the mind as organizing
The brain freezes the world into discrete mind moments, each capturing a barely adequate morsel of information, then processes these one by one in a rapid linear sequence. The result is a compiled virtual world of experience, more or less patterned on what’s `out there,’ but mostly organized around the needs and limitations of the apparatus constructing it. It is like the brain and its senses are hastily taking a series of snapshots, then stringing them together into a movie we call `the stream of consciousness.’
Andrew Olenszki, Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism
In front of our eyes
Meditation is misunderstood as something you envision in your head, when in fact it is something to be seen with your own eyes.
What you begin to see is that the place where you thought your life occurred — rumination and memory, anxiety and fear — isn’t where your life takes place at all. Those mental recesses are where pain occurs, but life occurs elsewhere, in a place we are usually too preoccupied to notice, too distracted to see: right in front of our eyes.
The point of meditation is to stop making things up and see things as they are.
Karen Maezen Miller
