Every time we make a mindful step, we are engaged in an act of enlightenment.
We can be enlightened about the fact that we are making a step.
Each step can have beauty in it.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Tag: Stress Reduction
Take time to nourish your spirit
One must — as in a swimming pool —
dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again —
laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things
Franz Kafka
photo RichardBH
Sunday Quote: When you feel stuck…what to do?
When we are no longer able to change a situation,
we are challenged to change ourselves.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Need to get somewhere, be someone
The psychological self is rooted in time. It needs to feel it is on a journey, that it is getting somewhere — anywhere. The journey is what provides it with a feeling of existence and continuity. If it weren’t going somewhere it would be forced to feel the fear of the present moment, the fear of not existing, of the void beneath its feet. Our individual journey is reinforced by the cultural norm. Our culture is so fixated on the necessity of doing that if we are idle for a while we are very likely to think we are wasting our time and our lives. Everyone wants to “have a life” and “get a life,” and that usually means throwing ourselves into some gainful activity that will show a tangible result.
Roger Housden, Dropping the Struggle
photo: payton chung
The danger of compulsive working
Western laziness ……consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy. We are so addicted to looking outside ourselves that we have lost access to our inner being almost completely. We are terrified to look inward, because our culture has given us no idea of what we will find. So we make our lives so hectic that we eliminate the slightest risk of looking into ourselves. … in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do.
Sogyal Rinpoche
photo: wusirichard
How to get free in our hearts
We often prefer to live in our ideas or dreams about life and not where it actually is.
Experiencing,
rather than trying to have special experiences
is where real freedom lies
Ezra Bayda, At Home in the Muddy Water
photo jaka ostrovrsnik
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