We can only be where we are: Right here, right now.
Zen practice is to accept that place with calm.
We cannot always be master of the situation, but we can always be master of ourselves.
Philip Toshio Sudo, Zen 24/7: All Zen All the TIme
Tag: Present moment
Take refuge
Training in mindfulness allows our minds to have a choice. At the moment in which you pause and realize that these thoughts are not really serving me, you have the option to come back to presence. This process of choosing becomes more powerful as you realize how thoughts can create suffering and separation. They create an “us” and a “them.” They create judgment and end up making us feel bad about ourselves.
In those moments when you’re lost in thought, what if you could pause and say, “OK, it is just a thought” That is revolutionary. That can change your life! Each time we recognize thinking and come back into the present moment with gentleness and kindness, we are planting a seed of mindfulness. We are creating a new habit – a new way of being in the world. We quiet down the incessant buzz of thoughts in our mind. We take refuge in what is true – the aliveness and tenderness and mystery of the present moment – rather than in the story line of our thoughts.
Tara Brach
Sunday Quote: Notice
Oops! The Moment!
Once you miss it, it is gone forever.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, French Photographer
We make our own problems
When you are completely absorbed in your breathing there is no self. What is your breathing? That breathing is not you, nor air. What is it? It is not self at all. When there is no self you have absolute freedom. Because you have a silly idea of self you have a lot of problems. So I say your problems are homemade.
Suzuki Roshi, teaching June 1st, 1966
Build the new
The secret of change is to focus all your energy
not on fighting the old,
but on building the new
Dan Milmann, Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book that Changes Lives
Fully here and yet not
No one needs to tell us
we are already on our onward way,
no one has to remind us
of our everyday and intimate
embrace with disappearance.
We were born saying goodbye
to what we love,
we were born
in a beautiful reluctance,
not quite ready
to breathe in this new world,
we are here and we are not,
we are present while still not
wanting to admit we have arrived.
David Whyte, Cleave
