Tag: Present moment

The harmony of things

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Once you know that there is something other than what you have bitten into most of the time, your choices take on a new kind of karmic significance… This process slowly tunes you back into the harmony of things. It’s like, if you’re driving to school and you are in a hurry and the traffic becomes a terrible opposition to you, you struggle to move faster and faster. But you could take a breath and say, ‘Well, I’m in traffic; when I get to school, I’ll get to school; I am doing the best that I can, but it is also about this moment.’ You open yourself up to the flow and accept that there is a certain rate at which the traffic moves.  

Ram Dass

Complaint

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Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. It’s the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid.

Pema Chodron

Our relationship to what is

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No matter how much we like or dislike, or are hurt or maimed by a thought, action or event, our attitudes do not colour the event itself, only our relationship to it.

As this is so, no matter how much we stomp or shout or cajole or whine, reality is what it is. In this is sacredness and dignity.

Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi, Cutting the Cat Into One: the Practice of the Bodhisattva Precepts

Exactly what we need

Karl Duffy2 Comments

It’s helpful to realize that this body that we have,

that’s sitting right here right now – with its aches and pains –

is exactly what we need to be fully human,

fully awake, fully alive.

Pema Chodron

What thoughts

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As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

Henry David Thoreau

Staying awake

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Zen is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake….We tend to daydream all the time, speculating about the future and dwelling on the past. Zen practice is about appreciating your life in this moment. If you are truly aware of five minutes a day, then you are doing pretty well. We are beset by both the future and the past, and there is no reality apart from the here and now.

Peter  Matthiessen, 1927 – 2014. American Writer