Many directions

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When we live superficially, we are always outside ourselves, never quite ‘with’ ourselves, always divided and pulled in many directions –  we find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we do not really mean, needing things we do not really need, exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and without meaning in our lives. “Why spend your money on what is not food and your earnings on what fails to satisfy?” (Isaiah 55)

Thomas Merton, Love and Living

photo Highways agency

Sunday Quote: Can we just be?

cow2Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something.

All your life you have been going after something, pursuing some goal.

Enlightenment is dropping all that.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Keeping space between

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When we watch football, we don’t watch it from the field. We are in the stands watching from a distance.

The players are running around but we are stable; there is a space between us and the game.

Similarly, at a concert, we watch the band from our seats. We do not take the stage. There is a distance between us and the performance. We are merely the watcher.

This is how we should watch our feelings – from a distance.

We should not slip down and cling to them

Ajahn Pramote, To See the Truth

Sunday Quote: the little things

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The little things?

The little moments?

They aren’t little

Jon Kabat Zinn

A place within

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Philosophically, stress is a perverted relationship to time. So that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim, and time has become routine. So at the end of the day, you probably haven’t had a true moment for yourself. And you know, to relax in and to just be.

Because, you know, the way in this country — there’s all the different zones. I think there are these zones within us as well. There’s surface time, which is really a rapid-fire Ferrari time… over-structured, like, and stolen from you, thieved all the time.

And what I love in this regard is my old friend Meister Eckhart…..he said, “There is a place in the soul — there is a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch.” And I really thought that was amazing, and if you cash it out, what it means is, that in — that your identity is not equivalent to your biography. And that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there’s still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.

John O Donohue, Interview with Krista Tippett, On Being

photo AgCam

In a nutshell…

A really clear and succinct definition of mindfulness practice, showing how it includes a evaluating, even judging aspect, discerning between helpful and unhelpful mental energies:

I often like to summarize correct practice in the following way:

Have mindfulness

and know bodily and mental phenomena as they really are

with a mind that is stable and impartial.

Ven Pramote Pamojjo, To see the Truth