Why on earth bother meditating?

Jon Kabat-Zinn:


"Beyond the ubiquity of stress and pain operating in my own life, my motivation to practice mindfulness is fairly simple: Each moment missed is a moment unlived. Each moment missed makes it more likely I will miss the next moment, and live through it cloaked in mindless habits of automaticity of thinking, feeling, and doing rather than living in, out of, and through awareness. I see it happen over and over again. Thinking in the service of awareness is heaven. Thinking in the absence of awareness can be hell. For mindlessness is not simply innocent or insensitive, quaint or clueless. Much of the time it is actively harmful, wittingly or unwittingly, both to oneself and to the others with whom we come in contact or share our lives. Besides, life is overwhelmingly interesting, revealing, and awe-provoking when we show up for it wholeheartedly and pay attention to the particulars."


http://www.spirituallyfit.com/volume6/issue1/stories/jonkabatzinn.htm

Joy creates

James Baraz:

"Joy creates a spaciousness in the mind that allows us to hold the suffering we experience inside us and around us without becoming overwhelmed, without collapsing into helplessness or despair. It brings inspiration and vitality, dispelling confusion and fear while connecting us with life. Profound understanding of suffering does not preclude awakening to joy. Indeed, it can inspire us all the more to celebrate joyfully the goodness in life."

Hum

inoma:

human,
not to think to be, better,
not to think to be, worse,
only to know with one heart that
every living being is equal and unique.

Love is

Christina Feldman:

"Love is tending to what is rather than endlessly seeking what is not." 

Taking the leap

Pema Chödrön:

"This is a work in progress, a process of uncovering our natural openness, uncovering our natural intelligence and warmth. I have discovered, just as my teachers always told me, that we already have what we need. The wisdom, the strength, the confidence, the awakened heart and mind are always accessible, here, now, always. We are just uncovering them. We are rediscovering them. We’re not inventing them or importing them from somewhere else. They’re here. That’s why when we feel caught in darkness, suddenly the clouds can part. Out of nowhere we cheer up or relax or experience the vastness of our minds. No one else gives this to you."

 

From: Taking the Leap

Sound

by Nirmala


truth is too simple for words
before thought gets tangled up in nouns and
verbs
there is a wordless sound
a deep breathless sigh
of overwhelming relief
to find the end of fiction
in this ordinary
yet extraordinary moment
when words are recognized
      as words
and truth is recognized
            as everything else 


from: www.poetry-chaikhana.com

Thoroughness

Inoma:


There is a clear consciousness of our own wholeness, our inherent completeness, in order to be free and to free one another.

Change

Sri Chinmoy:

"Yesterday I was smart and I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise and I want to change myself."

Paradoxical theory

The paradoxical theory of change says that change comes about as a result of full acceptance of what is, rather than a striving to be different.


from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_therapy

Acceptance

Tara Brach:


"The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is that we are aware of what is happening within our body and mind in any given moment, without trying to control or judge or pull away. I do not mean that we are putting up with harmful behavior—our own or another’s. This is an inner process of accepting our actual present-moment experience. It means feeling sorrow and pain without resisting. It means feeling desire or dislike for someone or something without judging ourselves for the feeling or being driven to act on it."


from: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=208688242537281

Beingness

Inoma:


Beingness is naked and beautiful always. Words and names are like clothes, sometimes practical.

Sound for today

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s40QTwp7C78

Healing waters

Do not wipe tears away. Let them flow.

The wonder of balance

Andrew Olendzki:

"We are so used to projecting our attention out into the world around us, it is a noticeable shift when we face inward and feel the subtle swaying of the head on the shoulders, along with all the muscular microcompensations keeping our body centered in gravity. The acrobat, like the meditator, is bringing conscious awareness to a process that is always occurring but is generally overlooked, which is a vital first step to learning anything valuable about ourselves."


“Keep Your Balance”

The measure of success

inoma:


what is success? consider that wrong and even bad ideas were "successful" as history shows. meaning they had many followers. so success is not what we usually think it is. the measure of success is within one. you alone can know whether you are on a successful path or not.

The essence of each other

inoma:


it is good that human self-confidence is unreal as long as one has no faith in and great respect for the essence of each other.

Sound for today

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stw4rmM_MeI&feature=related

Maha Mrityunjaya mantra

Om Tryambakam yajah mahey
Sugandhim pushti vardhanam
Urdvaru kamivah bandhanat
Mrityormukshiya mamritate

"I worship One Lord in Three Persons (Creator, Sustainer, and Liberator),

Who presses out the nectar that sweetens creation and makes all creatures ripe.

Just as the fattened gourd effortlessly snaps from the vine when juicy and full,

So may my clinging mind be freed from things that pass away,

Even as my heart is nourished with the nectar of eternity."

(Translation by Fred Lamotte)

Baboons

http://inoma-words.blogspot.com/2010/06/baboon.html

Yes, yes

inoma:

go, go,  get to know

this quality more deeply.

take regularly a bath
in the warmth of your heart.

Serenity prayer

Reinhold Niebuhr:

“May I have the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Attentive

It is never too late to be attentive.

Breath

Inoma:

first, i am breathing.
suddenly i am breathed.
and then there is just breath.
what a miracle of perception

Body awareness

Jill Satterfield:

The body holds memories and feels emotions and thoughts before the mind actually cognizes them. That’s fascinating to me. If we aren’t conscious of our thoughts and emotions as they arise, they won’t just magically disappear; they go into the body, stay on as a memory, and shape tissue.

So, if we get intimately in tune with our own body, we can feel what we’re going to think and what we might be just about to act upon (and the repercussions of those thoughts turning into actions) before they carry us away. We can feel emotions starting to rise in the body, and with that information and those clues, we can take a moment, pause, make a choice, and not have to be swallowed by or lose control of our emotions. For instance, in the case of someone who’s angry a lot. Once they know their body a little more, they can feel the patterns, the very beginning stages of an outburst. One has time to take a pause and quell, rather than continually losing control. So the body offers us this incredible mirror or portal into the mind and heart. The mind and the heart kind of wear the body. So the body is the physical house for the mind and heart, for consciousness. And our consciousness has a lot of influence and can actually shape the physical body and more frequently than not, it does.

(...)

I haven’t met anyone who can’t benefit from meditation, body awareness, kindness and understanding.

Once we see that we are all in this together, once we begin as individuals to embrace our humanity, to begin to be nice to ourselves and then to eventually be kind to ourselves and to eventually love ourselves, everything opens up. There’s not a separation between me and you, or you and anyone else, or them, and us. It’s about being human. Isn’t a wonderful way to live, to fully embrace our textural, dimensional, colorful, rich humanity?

http://www.schoolforcompassionateaction.org/

In the present

Charlotte Joko Beck:

"Being in the present is the point of sitting and of practice in general: it helps us to be wiser about life, more compassionate, more oriented to what needs to be done. We become more effective in our work. Such outcomes are wonderful; yet we cannot strive for them or make them happen.All that we can do is prepare the necessary conditions. We need to be sure that the soil is well prepared, rich and loose and fertile, so that if the seed falls, it will spring forth rapidly. The student’s job is not to be hunting for outcomes, but to be preparing the way. As the Bible says, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” That is our work."


from: “Nothing Special”

Heal

invitation . today . first humming . something unknown . then singing . just my song  . and letting . the language . also . be . unknown

Humility

Christina Feldman:

All forms of conceit give rise to the endless thoughts and storytelling that solidify the beliefs we hold about ourselves and others. Liberating ourselves from conceit and the agitation it brings begins with our willingness to sensitize ourselves to the subtle and obvious manifestations of conceit as they appear. The clues lie in our judgments and comparisons, the views we construct about ourselves and others. Suffering, evaluating, envy, and fear are all signals asking us to pause and listen more deeply. We learn to bow to those moments, knowing they are moments when we can either solidify conceit or liberate it.


(...)

A teacher was asked, “What is the secret to your happiness and equanimity?” She answered, “A whole-hearted, unrestricted cooperation with the unavoidable.” This is the secret and the essence of a bow. It is the heart of mindfulness and compassion. To bow is to no longer hold ourselves apart from the unpredictable nature of all of our lives; it is to cultivate a heart that can unconditionally welcome all things. We bow to what is, to all of life. By liberating our minds from ideas of “better than,” “worse than,” or “the same as,” we liberate ourselves from all views of “self”and “other.” The bow is a way to the end of suffering, to an awakened heart.


from: http://www.tricycle.com/

Space

Eckhart Tolle:

Can I be the space for this?" is the primordial spiritual practice. Usually, or always, you will find that, yes, you can be.

Beyond language

Norman Fischer:

When in daily living we learn to return again and again to where we are in body, emotion, and mind, we are learning to hold our language and views lightly, to see that they are ever-evolving currents of being, that they are not only ours but belong to everyone else as well.

Marvelous understanding

St. John of the Cross:

I was sad one day & went for a walk. I sat in a field. A rabbit noticed my condition & came near. It often does not take more than that to help at times: to just be close to creatures who are so full of knowing, so full of love that they don't chat, they just gaze with their marvelous under-standing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Inoma:

Johann told me he grew up during ww2 in an institution for children who were said to be difficult to educate..They  mistreated him and several times he tried to escape. A few times he was successful, but always for a few days only. One time he ran into the forest and slept there. In the morning he woke up, opened his eyes and saw directly into the eyes of a salamander quietly sitting near him. "We gazed, and then," Johann said, "I could cry for the first time in years."

Without reason I am

 Today I am, without a reason why. And it is just beautiful.

from: Wikimedia commons

Krippensteiner

Music for today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2ujz-R0WZg&feature=related

Greetings :-)

This moment is live

Thich Nhat Hanh:

"Drink your tea reverently, as if it is the axis on which the earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this moment is life."

Life expressing itself

Jon Kabat-Zinn:

"More than anything else, I have come to see meditation as an act of love, an inward gesture of benevolence and kindness toward ourselves and toward others, a gesture of the heart that recognizes our perfection even in our obvious imperfection, with all our shortcomings, our wounds, our attachments, our vexations, and our persistent habits of unawareness. It is a very brave gesture: to take one's seat for a time and drop in on the present moment without adornment. In stopping, looking, and listening, in giving ourselves over to all our senses, including mind, in any moment, we are in that moment embodying what we hold most sacred in life. Making the gesture, which might include assuming a specific posture for formal meditation, but could also involve simply becoming more mindful or more forgiving of ourselves, immediately re-minds us and re-bodies us. In a sense, you could say that it refreshes us, makes this moment fresh, timeless, freed up, wide open. In such moments, we transcend who we think we are. We go beyond our stories and all our incessant thinking, however deep and important it sometimes is, and reside in the seeing of what is here to be seen and the direct, non-conceptual knowing of what is here to be known, which we don't have to seek because it is already and always here. We rest in awareness, in the knowing itself which includes, of course, not knowing as well. We become the knowing and the not knowing, as we shall see over and over again. And since we are completely embedded in the warp and woof of the universe, there is really no boundary this benevolent gesture of awareness, no separation from other beings, no limit to either heart or mind, no limit to our being or our awareness, or to our openhearted presence. In words, it may sound like an idealization. Experienced, it is merely what it is, life expressing itself, sentience quivering within infinity, with things just as they are."

excerpt from `Coming to Our Senses`

Silence and letting go

Thomas Merton:

“…..as we progressively let ourselves go into silence, we also feel more acutely our resistance to letting go, our fear of loss of control, of vulnerability, of not knowing. Facing these fears is the real work of practice.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jack Kornfield:

"Paradoxically, letting go is both the goal and the path."

Two ways

By Rabia Basri,
translation Charles Upton


I have two ways of loving You:
A selfish one
And another way that is worthy of You.
In my selfish love, I remember You and You alone.
In that other love, You lift the veil
And let me feast my eyes on Your Living Face.

Divine belonging

John  O´Donohue:

"If you really live your life to the full, death will never have power over you. It will never seem like a destructive, negative event. It can become, for you, the moment of release into the deepest treasures of your own nature; it can be your full entry into the temple of your soul. If you are able let go of things, you learn to die spiritually in little ways during your life. When you learn to let go of things, a greater generosity, openness, and breath comes into your life. Imagine this letting go multiplied a thousand times at the moment of your death. That release can bring you a completely new divine belonging."

from: http://www.johnodonohue.com/about

Mirror: language

Marshall B. Rosenberg:

If my child is not picking up the room and I say, “You are lazy,” lazy is an enemy image. If my life partner is not meeting my needs for intimacy and I say, “You are insensitive to my needs,” insensitive to my needs is an enemy image. When we say that some people are “terrorists,” that’s an enemy image. Enemy images turn people into things. When we see the other person as a monster, all we want to do is to punish them. This type of language disconnects us from what’s alive in one another, disconnects us from life

Nature

could it be, to assume there is hierarchy in nature is a fundamental misunderstanding?

nature persuades by teaching, but does not teach by persuading.

inoma

Weak and strong

I looked deeply and saw: what is usually regarded as strength, is often weakness. And the other way around.

Inoma

Genuine communication

formulating personal opinions as personal opinions, not general truths, allows space for another view.

inoma

Better ways

There are better ways to live,
in accordance with nature.

Great Spirit Thank You 

for showing us these ways
and for helping us to walk them.

Understanding

awareness is. it means
understanding that
whenever anger arises,
intelligence is lost.

inoma

Pupil asks rebbe

And the pupil asks the rebbe, “Why does it tell us to lay these words upon our heart? Why doesn’t it tell us to put them in our heart?” And the rebbe answers, “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and the words can’t get it in. So we just put them on top of the heart. And there they stay. There they stay until someday, when the heart breaks, they fall in.”  

through Jacob Needleman
 
 

Support

"When we surrender to the inherent mystery of how support is truly given and received, as teachers and therapists we recognize the hugeness of what we don't know. This in itself is immeasurable support for those who look to us. Spirituality meets.."

Gangaji

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Teachers and therapists or whoever we are.

...

Nonviolence

Nonviolence begins with respect, not only for humans, but also for the Earth, the plants and the animals. Thank you joy of being.

DI

Apache Blessing

”May the sun bring you energy by day,
May the moon softly restore you by night,
May the rain wash away your worries,
May the breeze blow new strength into your being.
May you walk gently through the world
and know its beauty all the days of your life.”

Apache Blessing

from: http://askthelama.com/

Every breath

“Gratefulness is the heart of prayer.”

Brother David Steindl-Rast

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Make every breath a prayer."

St. Paul

A living path

I walk a Living Path. May I honor precious moments of meeting, no matter how fleeting.

:-)
DI

Present

Often, not more words are needed, but someone truly listening. Non-judgmental listening is a healing present to both, the part that expresses and the part who listens.

TYL

InOma

Flowers

Flowers are always singing, even when they are withered. Flowers enjoy their lives constantly. They have knowledge of transformation, not of death. Flowers do not suffer and they never compare themselves.

InOma

Trust in life

Let us have patience. Every false path is like a blind alley. With the presence of humility and receptivity comes guidance and protection in experience and trust in Live grows. Beloved are we, all together.

TYL

Practice of peace

"Most important is to become nonviolence, so that when a situation presents itself, we will not create more suffering. To practice nonviolence, we need gentleness, loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity directed to our bodies, our feelings, and other people. With mindfulness--the practice of peace--we can begin by working to transform the wars in ourselves."

Thich Nhat Hanh

Spirit of the valley

"In the valley of countless flowers, roots mingle. Wars begin on mountaintops. Peace comes from the spirit of the valley."

Fred Lamotte

Inter-connectedness

Inter-connectedness is. It lets us experience the beauty and wholeness of living, all brokenness included.

Inoma

Miracle

(M)ouse (I)guana (R)hinoceros (A)lligator (C)rab (L)izard (E)lephant

Being present

I act for the good of all, when I generate the energy of attentiveness, understanding and compassion for my wounded child.

Inoma

Shared humanity

"Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”

Pema Chödrön

The great reality

"Above all...go beyond words and images and concepts.
No imaginative vision or conceptual framework
is adequate to the great reality."

Bede Griffiths

Laid on ice

Thinking is life laid on ice.

Inoma

Question

What happens, when I see the world by numbers?

Deep sea

(from: Wikimedia Commons)

Heal thy self

The shadow of helplessness, the fear of helplessness....will teach you a lot. I am its student."

Saki Santorelli, Heal Thy Self (a wonderful book to me)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I am also its student. And it´s wonderful to experience that learning true respect leads to unlearning fear.

Inoma

Black bear

Black Bear in the Orchard by Mary Oliver

It was a long winter.
But the bees were mostly awake
in their perfect house,
the workers whirling their wings
to make heat.
Then the bear woke,

too hungry not to remember
where the orchard was,
and the hives.
He was not a picklock.
He was a sledge that leaned
into their front wall and came out

the other side.
What could the bees do?
Their stings were as nothing.
They had planned everything
sufficiently
except for this: catastrophe.

They slumped under the bear’s breath.
They vanished into the curl of his tongue.
Some had just enough time
to think of how it might have been –
the cold easing,
the smell of leaves and flowers

floating in,
then the scouts going out,
then their coming back, and their dancing –
nothing different
but what happens in our own village.
What pity for the tiny souls

who are so hopeful, and work so diligently
until time brings, as it does, the slap and the claw.
Someday, of course, the bear himself
will become a bee, a honey bee, in the general mixing.
Nature, under her long green hair,
has such unbendable rules,

and a bee is not a powerful thing, even
when there are many,
as people, in a town or a village.
And what, moreover, is catastrophe?
Is it the sharp sword of God,
or just some other wild body, loving its life?

Not caring a whit, black bear
blinks his horrible, beautiful eyes,
slicks his teeth with his fat and happy tongue,
and saunters on.

~~~~~~~~~

:-)

Attractive

Power is attractive.
More attractive is Love.

Two kinds of intelligence

There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,

as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts

from books and from what the teacher says,

collecting information from the traditional sciences

as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.

You get ranked ahead or behind others

in regard to your competence in retaining

information. You stroll with this intelligence

in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more

marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet,

one already completed and preserved inside you.

A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness

in the center of the chest. This other intelligence

does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid,

and it doesn't move from outside to inside

through the conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead

from within you, moving out.

Version by Coleman Barks

"The Essential Rumi"

HarperSanFrancisco, 1995

Heart

"Find the Master by traversing that sacred 12 inches from your head to your heart, where a different consciousness lives in you, a living Christ consciousness."

Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault

The unmoved

"The unmoved is the source of all movement."
(...)
"If you let restlessness move you, you lose touch with who you are."

Tao Te Ching, Translation by Stephen Mitchell

Sacred gift

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Albert Einstein

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My current understanding is Heart/Soul moves mind - the intuitive mind. The rational mind helps to recognise to what and brings it in to the human language of words. I need regular practice in meditation/stillness to feel grounded, centered and to know what to do.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://inoma-words.blogspot.com/2010/01/step-by-step.html

Flap at right time

How dragonflies use their four wings

from

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3342126/How-dragonflies-use-their-four-wings.html

Dr Usherwood said: "We found that two pairs of wings can allow the dragonfly to produce higher forces, allowing acceleration and climbing, while, if the wings flap with the right timing, the lower wings are able to reduce the energy wasted."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

my four cents:

top wings are heart and attentiveness.

attentiveness means focus, on purpose.

lower wings are mind and awareness.

awareness is, not focused, open

flap at right time

inspired by Tink

 TYL

On purpose

While being with ourselves, let us all have nonviolent redemptive goodwill - friendly attentiveness - warm determination - gentle curiosity.

Inoma

Oh

"oh don't you know you just take my breath away"

Claire Hamill

Practice meditation

"If we really knew how unhappy it was making this whole planet that we all try to avoid pain and seek pleasure - how that was making us so miserable and cutting us off from our basic heart and our basic intelligence - then we would practice meditation as if our hair were on fire. We would practice as if a big snake had just landed in our lap."

Pema Chödrön

Complement

"The vicious cycle of poverty, [Mother Theresa] said, has been clearly articulated and is widely known. What is less obvious and goes almost completely unacknowledged is the vicious cycle of wealth [my emphasis]. There is no recognition of the trap that wealth so often is, and of the sufferning of the wealthy: the lonliness, the isolation, the hardening of the heart, the hunger and poverty of the soul that can come with the burden of wealth. She said that I had extended little or no compassion to the strong, the powerful, and the wealthy, while they need as much compassion as anyone else on earth."

“You must open your heart to them and become their student and their teacher,” she said in her letter. “Open your compassion and include them. This is an important part of your life’s work. Do not shut them out. They also are your work.”

Lynne Twist, “The Soul of Money”

Sun & wind

"The sunlight brings the power; the wind carries the influence."

Dawna Markova

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You always move the entire universe.

So far

No recipes, formulas, generalizations, pre-scriptions for living in truthfulness. Although a part of me would like to have.

Have a good day :-)

“Look at the faces of people whom you meet. Each one has a incredible story behind their face. A story that you could never fully fathom, not only their own story, but the story of their ancestors. We all go back so far.”

Brother David Steindl Rast

~ A Good Day ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdbSVSMwHPA&feature=related

TYL

The reason

"The reason we’re often not there for others… is that we’re not there for ourselves."

Pema Chödrön

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The reason I am often not there for you...is that I am not there for myself.

The reason you are often not there for me....is that you are not there for yourself.

Goodness still is

You know, those good news are considered as something ordinary. But goodness still is natural. To question this needed a lot of false conditioning.

DI

Awareness is

Now we are unlearning and learning to have compassion for ourselves.

Indeed

"These great trees are prayers."

Rabindranath Tagore

"Every breath is a moment of intimacy: we are breathing in what the trees have just exhaled."

Lama Willa Miller