Joy isn’t something we have to find.
Joy is who we are if we’re not preoccupied with something else.
When we try to find joy, we are simply adding a thought – and an unhelpful one, at that – onto the basic fact of what we are.
Charlotte Joko Beck
Tag: wellbeing
Observing our mental states
Your practice of mindfulness has taught you that it is not your mental states themselves that make you uncomfortable, but your attitude toward them. You may have the idea that mental states are part of your own personality, part of your existence. Then you try to reject the unpleasant ones as if they were foreign bodies. But you cannot really reject them because they were not yours in the first place. Your best response is to maintain a steady practice of observing the mind, without reacting with clinging or aversion to anything that comes up, but skilfully working to free the mind from all unwholesome states.
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness
A path full of adventures
The spirit in which we approach anything new – a new day, a new week or a new year – is the key to how we will experience it. Most of our suffering is caused by our minds. Pay attention to your interval and beginning moments today, to the gaps between tasks or before we go into a meeting, or – especially – to the moment before we start a conversation. Are we open to receive whatever happens, freshly, in a spirit of adventure?
Vα εύχεσαι να είναι μακρύς ο δρόμος, γεμάτος περιπέτειες, γεμάτος γνώσεις
Wish that your journey be a long one,
full of adventures, full of knowing.
Cavafy’s advice to Odysseus before he set out on his voyage back to Ithaca
Sunday Quote: All you need to know
Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge
and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you,
you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.
A. A. Milne
Letting go of the old moment
In the Christian calendar, this day is the last one of the liturgical year. With sunset this evening, Advent begins, and the start of a new year.
With every breath, the old moment is lost, a new moment arrives. This is something meditators know. We breathe in and we breathe out. In so doing we abide in the ever-changing moment. We learn to welcome and accept this entire process: we exhale, and we let go of the old moment. It is lost to us. In so doing, we let go of the person we used to be. We inhale and we breathe in the moment that is becoming: we repeat the process. This is meditation. This is renewal. It is also life
Lama Surya Das, Practicing with Loss
Staying with ourselves
Meditation strengthen our steadfastness to be with ourselves. Whatever arises – pain, boredom, sleepiness, wild thoughts or emotions – we learn to stay with it. We come to see that meditation isn’t about attaining some ideal state. It’s about being able to stay with ourselves, no matter what. Even longterm practitioners sometime find themselves trying to use meditation as a way of escaping difficult emotions. But transformation only comes when we remember to move towards, rather than away from, our emotional distress. …In meditation we learn to stay with the non-conceptual energy of the emotion, experience it fully, then leave it as it is, without adding fuel to the fire.
Pema Chodron, Preface to Commit to Sit
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