Tag: Present moment

Becoming a silent watcher.

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Be present as the watcher of your mind  –  of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations.  Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react.  Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future.  Don’t judge or analyze what you observe.  Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction.  Don’t make a personal problem out of them.  You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.

Eckhart Tolle

Welcoming what is given today

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Gratitude welcomes what we are given. It doesn’t know any stories about how it should have been. To talk about gratitude is also to talk about what prevents gratitude, about resentment and bitterness. Resentment and bitterness are the residue that comes from dashed expectations. Since the world doesn’t fit our stories, there is a tension where I expected life to be more favorable to my hopes than it has been, or feel that the world has not bothered enough with me. That bitterness sticks in the body and the mind, so that the mind reruns its painful stories and the body stores them in awkwardness and discomfort.

John Tarrant, Practices of Gratitude.

Let go of the small sense of self.

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Meditation comes  alive through a growing capacity to release our habitual entanglement in the stories and plans, conflicts and worries that make up the small sense of self, and to rest in awareness. In meditation we do this simply by acknowledging the moment-to-moment changing conditions — the pleasure and pain, the praise and blame, the litany of ideas and expectations that arise. Without identifying with them, we can rest in the awareness itself, beyond conditions, and experience what my teacher Ajahn Chah called jai pongsai, our natural lightness of heart. Developing this capacity to rest in awareness nourishes samadhi (concentration), which stabilizes and clarifies the mind, and prajna (wisdom), that sees things as they are.

Jack Kornfield, A Mind like Sky: Wise Attention, Open Awareness.

Still the mind in order to love

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The eternal moment is outside of time, is not a part of our past or our future, and yet it is lived amidst all our everyday activities. It is in the eternal moment that love is born. Love does not belong to time, and its timeless quality is well known to all lovers. The lover has to learn to still the mind in order to catch the moment and stay true to love’s unfolding. Wayfarers tread a path that leads from illusions of time to the eternal moment that belongs to the soul.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Le, Signs of God

Sunday Quote: Living well

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My most inspiring thought is that this place, if I am to live well in it,

requires and deserves a lifetime of the most careful attention.

Wendell Berry

Finding space in our inner chatter

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Silence, a stilling of not only the voices outside but the inner voices, the roof brain chatter. Now, without the babble or words – inner and outer – I watch my mind, notice when a thought arises. I turn my attention inward, asking, “Who is thinking this thought?” As the mind turns to look, the thinker seems to disappear. But a focus comes from asking, a clearing, a deepening. No “me,” but a presence. Awareness.

When I first worked in a restaurant, I used to daydream of a mute helper, someone who had no interest whatsoever in speaking, She…wouldn’t tell about her plans for vacation, the fights with her mother, the ins and outs of her most recent relationship. In my daydream of a mute helper, I was envisioning a future version of myself, of course. My imagination was sending directions, subtle hints as to how to proceed. How to glimpse the sky, how to open into vastness. The odd thing is that in addition to this sense of spaciousness, I’m starting to feel close to people, to understand and sympathize with them on a new level, to participate in their lives in unexpected ways, to notice those around me as something more than irritants, as subjects rather than objects.

Kimberly Snow, In Buddha’s Kitchen