Tag: Mindfulness

Not liking the form of this moment

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A very common familiar analogy for being awake is the sun that is always shining behind the clouds. The clouds cover the sun, but the sun is still there….This precious unique moment is always here, always accessible to us. It never went anywhere. But we spend so much time pushing it away and resisting it and not liking the form in which it is happening, that we miss it. This is like the clouds coming in. We identify more with the clouds of our nature than with the sun. Pretty much, that  happens again and again. What’s always available to us – which we can come back to, to connect with – is the vastness and openness of our heart and mind in any moment of time.

Pema Chodron, Clouds and Sun

Forget climbing

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A woman said to Suzuki Roshi that she found it difficult to mix practice with the demands of being a householder. “I feel that I am trying to climb a ladder, but for every step upwards I slip back two steps” “Forget the ladder” Suzuki Roshi told her. “When you are awake everything is right here on the ground” He explained how the desire to gain anything means you miss the reality of the present. “When you realize the truth that everything changes, and find your composure in it, there you find yourself…” The goal is to let go of anything special and meet each moment with beginners mind.

Jack Kornfield, “Enlightenment” in Inquiring Mind

Sunday Quote: Nowhere to go, nothing to achieve

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If you cannot find the truth right where you are,

where else do you expect to find it?

Dogen

The not knowing which is somehow right

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Most western therapies are based on theories of personality; they are geared toward knowing, rather than not-knowing. An unspoken assumption in the therapeutic world is that we should always know who we are, and if we don’t that a real problem. So when an old maladaptive identity starts to break down, this may be frightening for client and therapist alike…. At times like this I rely on my own realization that none of us really knows who we are, that this is the nature of our being, that if we have a true self at all, it somehow lies in the heart of the unknowingness that opens up when we inquire deeply into our existence, and that we can hang out on the edge of this unknown, we may discover how to let ourselves be, without having to be something.

John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening

An underlying calm

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Meditation is not about trying to create something special, to get to a special state; meditation is more about uncovering what has always been and always is here. One is simply trying to bring external conditions into alignment with that fundamental reality of human nature.

Ajahn Amaro, Finding the Missing Peace

It becomes clear slowly

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I don’t know who God is exactly.
But I’ll tell you this.
I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a water splashed stone
and all afternoon I listened to the voices of the river talking….

And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me what they were saying.
Said the river I am part of holiness.
And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered the moss beneath the water.

I’d been to the river before, a few times.
Don’t blame the river that nothing happened quickly.
You don’t hear such voices in an hour or a day.
You don’t hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.
And it’s difficult to hear anything anyway, through
all the traffic, the ambition.

Mary Oliver, At the River Clarion