Very appropriate for Ireland this Autumn as we seem to go from one Atlantic Storm to the next. Also true of the difficulties in our lives.
When I interviewed Maya Angelou she told me to write this sentence on my notepad and to never forget it:
“Every storm runs out of rain”
I still think of that line to this day.
Alex Banayan, American author
The body only exists in the present moment; it doesn’t wander off into the past or the future. This might seem like an insignificant truism; however, when we start to look at our lives closely, we find that much of our difficulty and distress arises from dwelling on re-creations of the past – either positive or negative – or on hopes and worries about the future.
Despite the fact that, to the thinking mind, the past and the future seem like vast and solid realities…the closer we look at the experience of our life as it actually is, the more we see the past and future as hollow fabrications. They are mere memories and anticipations; it is rather the present that is vast and all-encompassing, and full of useful possibilities…. If we are trying to inhabit an imagined future or a reconstructed past, how can we possibly attune to the orchestra of life in the here-and-now?
Ajahn Amaro, “The Body of Truth” in Michael Stone (ed) Freeing the Body.
“The blue mountains are constantly walking.” Dōgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. “If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking.”
Dōgen is not concerned with “sacred mountains” – or pilgrimages, or spirit allies,….. His mountains are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness.…No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.
So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter, and go down to the 7-Eleven. The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back to into the waters.
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild
Notice [when you feel] the sense of ‘next’ and ‘about to’.
Train your reflex to return to the base of ground as a fundamental orientation. Develop this …reflex to return to ground and discharge.
Your energy can then rise into an embodied response, rather than a habit reaction.
Then whatever your intention or purpose is, it can be more measured.
Ajahn Sucitto
Our path will always be strewn with broken branches and stones, yet even the obstacles in our path are part of the path. They make it real. We are not angels and the hard edges of the physical world offer a resistance that, if they do not break us first, can temper the soul and open it to another world, which is nowhere if not here .
This life is a “vale of Soul-making” Keats says. When we see it that way, being lost is not only part of the journey; it is the royal way of becoming real, meaning that our outer knowing can be an accurate reflection of our inner knowing.
Roger Housden, Ten poems for Difficult Times
This is what should be done
By one who is skilled in goodness
Having glimpsed the state of perfect peace,
Let them be able and honest,
Upright and gentle in speech, humble and not proud
Contented and easy to satisfy,
Not burdened in their duties, and simple in living.
Peaceful and calm, wise and skilful,
not proud or demanding in nature.
The Metta Sutta
Mindfulbalance 