Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns…We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.
Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance.
photo andre engles
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
The Red Queen, in Through the Looking Glass
photo trishna datta
There’s not a good way to come into meditation or a bad way to come into meditation. It might feel preferable to show up feeling calm and spacious, but really meditation is about being awake and present to whatever is going on. You can’t critique your meditation in terms of good and bad. The only thing you can measure your meditation against is the question: “Was I present or not?” And even then, to say to yourself that you weren’t present is a result of the fact that you’ve been meditating and you recognized that fact. There’s some sense of awareness about what is actually happening.
Pema Chodron, How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with your mind
Clinging is weakened by the activity of meditation. For example, we sit quietly and experience the flow of feeling, the dependent and changing experience of our bodily form, and all the “I should do it” programs twitching in the mind. And through meditating we can unhook the reactions and reflex-activities by focusing on their changeability. This practice, although based on ethics and sense-restraint, doesn’t attempt to affect the topics that the mind is carrying in its perceptions and volitions….so that whatever our impulse or perception is, it’s just seen as another passing thing.
Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth
Our minds are continually splitting our experiences into “good” and “bad”, and coming to quick conclusions which can close down our openness to what is happening.
An extract from the visit of a small boy named Sin Hae to the temple of Hui Neng, the sixth and last Patriarch of Chan Buddhism, 638–713
Sin Hae stood up and bowed, saying, “Teach me.”
Hui Neng said, “You should not think of good and of bad; cut all thinking and all speech. Right now, what is it that teaches you?”
Sin Hae bowed, saying, “I don’t know.”
The Zen Master said, “Keep this ‘don’t know’ mind at all times, and you will understand what teaches you.”
Smile,
breathe,
and go slowly.
Thich Nhat Hanh
O snail
climb Mount Fuji
but slowly slowly
Kobayashi Issa, 1763 – 1828, Japanese Buddhist priest and poet
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