To bring your attention to a stone, a tree, or an animal does not mean to think about it, but simply to perceive it, to hold it in your awareness. … Something of its essence then transmits itself to you. You can sense how still it is, and in doing so the same stillness arises within you. You sense how deeply it rests in Being – completely at one with what it is and where it is. In realizing this you too come to a place of rest deep within yourself.
Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks
photo jarno
It takes three things to create a sense of significant being:
God,
a soul,
and a moment.
And the three are always present.
Rabbi Abbrahm Joshus Heschel
photo jack lea
Don’t go back over what has passed
Nor yearn for what is yet to be
What has passed has been abandoned
And the future is not yet here
The state of arising here and now
see it as it is, with insight
The Buddha, Majjhima Nikaya, 131
photo “mike” Michael L Baird
What is the hardest thing of all?
What seems to be the easiest: to use your eyes to see what lies in front of you
Goethe, The Heart of Listening
Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling. This is what Christians call the face of God: simply taking in this world as it manifests. We feel our body; we hear the cars and birds. That’s all there is.
Charlotte Joko Beck.
photo nottsexminer
Meanwhile, here we are, missing the fullness of the present moment, which is where the soul resides. It’s not like you have to go someplace else to get it. So the challenge here is, Can we live this moment fully? When you ask a group of people to spend five minutes watching their own breaths moving in and out of their bodies, just as an experiment, they discover that their minds are like bubbling vats, and it’s not so easy to stay on the breath. The mind has a life of its own. It carries you away. Over a lifetime, you may wind up in the situation where you are never actually where you find yourself. You’re always someplace else, lost, in your head, and therefore in a kind of dysfunctional or nonoptimal state. Why dysfunctional? Because the only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment, because this is the only moment any of us ever gets. You’re only here now; you’re only alive in this moment.The past in gone, and I don’t know what’s coming in the future. It’s obvious that if I want my life to be whole, to resonate with feeling and integrity and value and health, there’s only one way I can influence the future: by owning the present.
Jon Kabat Zinn
photo kevin higgins
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