If we are not mindful, it’s not tea we are drinking, but our own afflictions and illusions
If the tea becomes real, we become real.
When we are able to truly meet the tea, at that very moment we are truly alive
Thich Nhat Hanh
Meet the tea
Tag: Present moment
The real journey is here
Don’t go off sightseeing.
The real journey is right here.
The great excursion starts
from exactly where you are.
Don’t look for the remedy of your troubles
outside yourself.
You are the medicine.
You are the cure for your own sorrow.
Rumi, The Journey Starts here
Show up
I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do
was to show up for my life
and not be ashamed.
Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year
Enjoy this day
We spend so much of our lives inhabiting a fictitious future or nostalgically indulging in memories and reminiscences that we fail to notice this extraordinary thing that is happening to us right now. It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in the morning and feel bored.
Stephen Bachelor, in an interview with Wes Nisker, Inquiring Mind
How to keep our calm
Wonder exists in experiencing whatever manifests before you,
and practice must go beyond the present time.
Adapt to conditions and merge with awakening,
then you will not be obstructed by the many tiny motes of dust.
Hongzhi, 1091-1157, Chan Master
A larger perspective
Think about going to the movies. Within seconds, we’re captured by the display on the screen. If it’s a happy movie, we laugh; if it’s a sad movie, we cry. If that’s all that we’re aware of, we don’t really have much choice.
However, if we were to take that same movie and project it on a screen in the middle of an open field in broad daylight, we would be much less likely to get captured. If there’s a big explosion or a love scene, perhaps we’ll pay attention for a little bit, but then our attention will get drawn elsewhere. We see dogs playing, we feel the grass beneath our feet, we hear a plane going overhead. Everything in the environment is so much more real, vast, and vivid than what’s on the movie screen that we don’t get so fascinated by it as easily. The movie is still there, but we’re not bound by it. Our attention is free to roam beyond the film’s storyline, because the context has become so much bigger than the dark theatre.
From this point of view, we can consider that freedom may not actually come from improving the story that’s playing on the screen. In fact, it might come from placing whatever that story is, in all of its complexity, in a larger environment of awareness. Perhaps we don’t have to improve the story we tell about ourselves, about life, in order to experience freedom.
Bruce Tift, Already Free
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