A lot of clouds on the mountains these days. A lot of movement in the weather, generally unsettled, gliding by, passing through. The mountains remain unmoved:
The clouds above us come together and disperse;
The breeze in the courtyard departs and returns.
Life is like that, so why not relax?
Who can keep us from celebrating?
Lu-Yu
Dance first, think later,
It’s the natural order.
Samuel Beckett
This vanishes, that vanishes, but that which knows
their vanishing doesn’t vanish. . . .
All that remains is simple
awareness, utterly pure.
Ajahn Maha Boowa
When the retreat center I co-founded, the Insight Meditation Society, first opened, someone created a mock brochure describing a retreat there, with …a wonderful made up motto for us: “It is better to do nothing than to waste your time.” I loved that motto, and thought it exemplified a lot about how meditation serves to help us unplug. Although that motto never made it into our official presentation, it actually was an accurate description of mindfulness meditation. Basically, we enter into mindfulness practice so that we can learn how to do nothing and not waste our time, because wasting our time is wasting our lives.
We come to meditation to learn how not to act out the habitual tendencies we generally live by, those actions that create suffering for ourselves and others, and get us into so much trouble. Doing nothing does not mean going to sleep, but it does mean resting – resting the mind by being present to whatever is happening in the moment, without adding on the effort of attempting to control it. Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.
Sharon Salzberg, How Doing Nothing Can Help You Truly Live
If this job is no good, change jobs, If this wife is no good, change wives. If this town is no good, change towns … The underlying thinking is that the reasons for these troubles is outside of you – in the location, in others, in circumstances …This way of thinking and seeing is an all-too-prevalent trap. There is no successful escaping from yourself in the long run, only transformation … There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation is faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges. In other words, you must be willing to let life itself become our teacher
Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever you go, There you are
Aware of my body, I breathe in. Relaxing my body, I breathe out.
Calming my body, I breathe in. Caring for my body, I breathe out
Thich Nhat Hahn
Breathing is the movement of life, the vital process that connects the body with its environment. The more we open and deepen awareness of the breath and the body, the m0re we understand the intrinsic dynamism of our entire experience. Nothing stands still for a moment. Breath, heartbeat, body, feelings, thoughts, environment are facts of an indivisible, interactive system, no part of which can really be claimed as “me” or “mine”
Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs.
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