Meditation is really about paying attention,
and the only way we can pay attention is through the senses, including the mind.
Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves, and our experience.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Tag: Present moment
The difficulties are the way
View all problems as challenges.
Look upon negativities that arise as opportunities to learn and to grow.
Don’t run from them, condemn yourself, or bury your burden in saintly silence.
You have a problem? Great.
More grist for the mill. Rejoice, dive in, and investigate.
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English
Everything comes around
Don’t grieve.
Anything you lose comes round in another form
Rumi
Decluttering our minds
Gaps between activities allow our minds to reopen, expand and have original, often time-and-effort-saving big ideas. So don’t walk with your head down, lost in thought. Don’t just text and call folks when you’re driving or waiting. Don’t read the newspaper when you’re in the bathroom. Allow a little space in your life. Doing nothing is the foundation for doing anything – and it’s one thing we Americans are really, really bad at.
So let go of one or two minutes of entertainment a day – and look out upon this life and world.
Waylon Lewis, Huffington Post
Seeing the bigger picture
The more things go “our way” for a while, the more we can believe that that is the way it is supposed to be.
And when things don’t go “our way,” which sooner or later they will not, we can get angry, disappointed, depressed, devastated……… forgetting that it was never “supposed to be” any one way at all.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, Arriving at your own Door
Holding the heart open
Had a beautifu
l stroll this morning on a trail in a forest. The leaves on the trees were shades of red and orange and yellow and the sun was shining brightly. Suddenly not far away on the trail I saw a deer. They come down into this part of the forest because it is a refuge, safe from hunters. It stood and watched me carefully, with big bright eyes. I was full of tenderness toward this timid creature, but it turned away, afraid to trust any human.
The human heart is like that. We want so much to connect, to relax with others, but we wait to see and test if they can actually hold our hearts and our fears. We seem to continually be on the alert for danger. Frequently we have moments like this encounter – with people or with events in our life – when we are faced with a choice. Do we keep the heart open or do we turn away? Can we stay open to all we encounter, knowing that everything we meet can be worked with. I know I find this hard and often say “no” to life as it presents itself in this moment and I contract and pull away.
Mindfulbalance 