We can spend a lot of time each day as if in a trance, missing each moment as we lean into the next. One way to counteract this, and enjoy your life more, is to let yourself notice the little things today with fresh eyes; simple things, like a cup of coffee, a smile from a colleague, the dew on the grass. In this way we pause and refresh the heart.
In the dew of little things
the heart finds its morning
and is refreshed.
Kahlil Gibran
Mindfulness and compassion training is a radical process of letting go of our burdens. We are not trying to be more mindful or more compassionate: that’s just more work. Instead we can sit down for a few minutes, see what arises and give ourselves love just because….just because. And then go gently back into the world.
Chris Germer
What creates the sense of suffering for me…is the feeling that my mind cannot relax and accommodate the truth of my experience unless it is what I wanted. Perhaps the most painful habit I have is that of delusion, of imagining that somehow I am in charge of how everything turns out. My wishes and my actions have something to do with what happens to me. Ultimately, however I am not in charge. I keep learning this lesson over and over again, both by paying attention in meditation and by paying attention in my life, but when my mind is startled or overwhelmed by stress, I forget
Sylvia Boorstein, in A Year of Living Mindfully
photo ashokajegroo
It’s really important to be careful and attentive to how much one gets swept up into the busyness. Those are two different things — actually doing something and the frantic, busy, scattered energy that you bring to the task. Try to watch and reflect on the feeling behind what you’re doing. What is the energy behind it? Recognize where the feeling of agitation comes from. So much depends upon staying with the breathing — breathing into the activity of what we’re doing. Sometimes it helps to step back and slow down, because often less gets accomplished the more frantic you become, in terms of actual physical accomplishment, as well as in your sense of enjoyment and harmony with others. Often it’s more the attitude that we carry that’s problematic because you can only do one thing at a time, anyway. We carry around in our minds all the things we think we have to do and that stirs up this frantic energy. So just breathe into what we are doing, be with it, not getting too swept up. Make the breath a force for settling.
Ajahn Pasanno, Breathe into busy activity
Even if people know that names aren’t reality,
They don’t see that reality itself has no root.
Name … reality … both are beside the point.
Find joy in the ever-shifting flow.
Ryokan
photo Thailand, Quentin and Bianca King,
The river flows rapidly down the mountain, and then all of a sudden it gets blocked with big boulders and a lot of trees. The water can’t go any farther, even though it has tremendous force and forward energy. It just gets blocked there. That’s what happens with us, too; we get blocked like that. Letting go at the end of the out-breath, letting the thoughts go, is like moving one of those boulders away so that the water can keep flowing, so that our energy and our life force can keep evolving and going forward. We don’t, out of fear of the unknown, have to put up these blocks, these dams, that basically say no to life and to feeling life.
Pema Chodron
photo jim champion
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