All Saints Day. We sometimes think that saints and bodhisattvas have the ability to float above everything.
Life does continually go up and down. People and situations are unpredictable and so is everything else.
Everybody knows the pain of getting what we don’t want: saints, sinners, winners, losers. I feel gratitude that someone saw the truth and pointed out that we don’t suffer this kind of pain because of our personal inability to get things right.
Pema Chodron
I don’t know anything about consciousness.
I just try to teach my students how to hear the birds sing
Shunryu Suzuki roshi, 1904 – 1971
What would happen if you put striving aside?
What if your practice was simply being present ?
Just open awareness. Just here. No longer anything to find. Just being present.
And then within that….letting your own heart teach you. Letting your own heart guide you.
What if you trusted that your own heart is really your great teacher?
Henry Shukman, Zen teacher, Mountain Cloud Zen Center
Even the briefest moment of silence is both
a way of coming into the present
and a way of moving on.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Choiceless awareness is a quality of mind that is free from making judgments, decisions or generating commentary as it meets with sense experiences. It is a mind that responds to each new moment without the burden of its past history or of making future projections. When the mind no longer clings anywhere, not even to the idea of not clinging anywhere, we realize, either suddenly or gradually, that we truly already are that for which we have been searching
Matthew Flickstein, Meditation teacher, Cultivating Choiceless Awareness
Peace can only exist in the present moment. It is ridiculous to say “Wait until I finish this, then I’ll be free to live in peace”. What is “this”? A diploma, a job, a house, the payment of debt? If you think that way peace will never come. There is always another “this” that will follow the present one. If you are not living in peace at this moment, you’ll never be able to. If you truly want to be at peace, you must be at peace right now. Otherwise there is only hope for peace “some day.”
Thich Nhat Hahn, The Sun my Heart
