Sonntag, 22. Mai 2011

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."

Sonntag, 15. Mai 2011

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`

Samstag, 7. Mai 2011

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.”

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Jack Kornfield:

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