Tag: Present moment

The greatest gift we can give today

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From William Stafford, A Ritual to Read to Each Other:

If you don’t know the kind of person I am 

And I don’t know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind….

Seeing a person free of everything we thought of him or her is a most extraordinary event. Things become luminous. We realize our common nature of no-nature. This is seeing from the heart – compassion.

Katherine Thanas, The Truth of This Life

Starting over

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Thoughts evoke emotions, tensions, excitement and stress, and can bring on exhaustion and sickness. Awareness reveals this simply to be so. Awareness is freedom from wanting to improve oneself or to put oneself down. It … opens one up to whatever else is happening this instant: breathing, a bird singing, a motor humming, the wind blowing, thoughts moving, the body tensing and relaxing…

Toni Packer

Really drinking tea

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When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you’re not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You’re drinking your projects, you’re drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Sunday Quote: love

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The first duty of love is to listen.

Paul Tillich, 1886 – 1965,  German-American philosopher and  theologian

Not identifying

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From Ram Dass, who passed away just a few days ago

Now the whole idea of a meditative practice is the process of very simply extracting awareness from the identification with thought and sensation

Quiet in heart

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And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

Wendell Berry