Stepping back from your emotional attachments

Art : Khaled Akil
 

"Detaching from our emotional responses encourages an objective perspective about our challenges.

 Our oversensitivity to difficulties is usually caused by our emotional
investment in a particular outcome.
By choosing instead to step back from our emotions,
we give ourselves the ability to remain impartial to the unsettling events in our lives.

While we may still feel concerned,
interested, and connected to our life circumstances,
we are no longer controlled by them.

This new, objective perspective gives us the freedom and courage
to embrace a peace-oriented state of mind

that cannot help but have a positive effect in every aspect of our lives.

Stepping back from your emotional attachments
can give you the objectivity to make wiser choices."

Lama Karma Chötso

Open heart.

Art : Adam Raasalhague

"When we find ourselves in a situation in which our buttons are being pushed,

we can choose to repress or act out, or we can choose to practice.

If we can start to do the exchange, breathing in with the intention of keeping our hearts

open to the embarrassment or fear or anger that we feel,

then to our surprise we find that we are also open to what the other person is feeling.

Open heart is open heart."

Chögyam Trungpa

 

 

 

King Creosote and Jon Hopkins - First Watch

 

 

 

 

Life as it is lived suffices

Photo : Olivier Föllmi, Nepal

"Life as it is lived suffices.
It is only when the disquieting intellect steps in and tries to murder it that we stop
to live and imagine ourselves to be short of or in something.
Let the intellect alone, it has its usefulness in its proper sphere,
but let it not interfere with the flowing of the life-stream.
If you are at all tempted to look into it, do so while letting it flow.
The fact of flowing must under no circumstances be arrested or meddled with…

　

[…]

The great fact of life itself … flows altogether outside of these vain exercises of the intellect or of the imagination.

　

[…]

　

No amount of wordy explanations will ever lead us into the nature of our own selves.
The more you explain, the further it runs away from you.
It is like trying to get hold of your own shadow."

D.T. Suzuki

be BUDDHA

One becomes Buddha the moment one does not feel anger when one says or does
something against one's interest and does not feel proud when one says good about
one's goodness.........remain unattached in both Situation ..........perhaps we lead our
life towards this perfection and be BUDDHA

Meditation

"Meditation is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss, or tranquility, nor is it attempting to be a better person.
It is simply the creation of a space in which we are able to expose and undo our neurotic games,
our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes."

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Inside Yourself

Art : "Inside Yourself" by Elena Ray

"It is useful to consider the body as the anchor for the senses and the mind; they are all interrelated.

Feel your entire physical body. Allow your breathing to become relaxed and quiet.

When your body and breath become very still, you may feel a very light sensation, almost like flying, which carries with it a fresh, alive quality.

Open all your cells, even the molecules that make up your body, unfolding them like petals.

Hold nothing back: open more than your heart; open your entire body, every atom of it.

Then a beautiful experience can arise that has a quality you can come back to again and again, a quality that will heal and sustain you."

Tarthang Tulku, Openness Mind

Letting there be room for not knowing

"Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.
When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story.
It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that.
We don’t know anything.
We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know."

Pema Chödron

Self-consciousness

Art : Daria Petrilli

"Self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double,
and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous.
Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering."


Alan W. Watts

Live in joy

Art : Elena Ray

‘Live in joy,
In love,
Even among those who hate.
Live in joy,
In health,
Even among the afflicted.
Live in joy,
In peace,
Even among the troubled.
Look within.
Be still.
Free from fear and attachment.
Know the sweet joy of the way.'



from the Dhammapada

Just be ordinary

Elena Ray "Dreamstime"

"In Buddhism there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special.

Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you’re tired go and lie down.

The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand."

Lin Chi

The older I become

"The older I become,

the more I sense,

the less I speak,

the more I pray —

in ever so many ways."

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, The Virgin of Guadalupe & the Memorae Prayer
http://kaykeys.net/spirit/mary/memorae.html

Sandstorm

Photo : Karoline Hjorth, Eyes as Big as Plates

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions.
You change direction but the sandstorm chases you.
You turn again, but the storm adjusts.
Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn.
Why?
Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away,
something that has nothing to do with you.
This storm is you. Something inside of you.
So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm,
closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in,
and walk through it, step by step.
There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time.
Just fine white sand swirling into the sky like pulverized bones.
That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine."

Haruki Murakami, from 'Kafka on the Shore'

I want to give thanks

Photo : Ernst Haas

I want to give thanks to the divine

Labyrinth of causes and effects

For the diversity of beings

That form this singular universe,

For Reason, that will never give up its dream

Of a map of the Labyrinth,

For Helen’s face and the perseverance of Ulysses,

For love, which lets us see others

As God sees them,

For the solid diamond and the flowing water,

For Algebra, a palace of exact crystals,

For the mystic coins of Angelus Silesius,

For Schopenhauer,

Who perhaps deciphered the universe,

For the blazing of fire,

That no man can look at without an ancient wonder,

For mahogany, cedar, and sandalwood,

For bread and salt,

For the mystery of the rose

That spends all its colour and can not see it,

For certain eves and days of 1955,

For the hard riders who, on the plains,

Drive on the cattle and the dawn,

For mornings in Montevideo,

For the art of friendship,

For Socrates’ last day,

For the words spoken one twilight

From one cross to another,

For that dream of Islam that embraced

A thousand nights and a night,

For that other dream of Hell,

Of the tower of cleansing fire

And of the celestial spheres,

For Swedenborg,

Who talked with the angels in London streets,

For the secret and immemorial rivers

That converge in me,

For the language that, centuries ago, I spoke in Northumberland,

For the sword and harp of the Saxons,

For the sea, which is a shining desert

And a secret code for things we do not know

And an epitaph for the Norsemen,

For the word music of England,

For the word music of Germany,

For gold, that shines in verses,

For epic winter,

For the title of a book I have not read: Gesta Dei per Francos,

For Verlaine, innocent as the birds,

For crystal prisms and bronze weights,

For the tiger’s stripes,

For the high towers of San Francisco and Manhattan Island,

For mornings in Texas,

For that Sevillian who composed the Moral Epistle

And whose name, as he would have wished, we do not know,

For Seneca and Lucan, both of Cordova,

Who, before there was Spanish, had written

All Spanish literature,

For gallant, noble, geometric chess,

For Zeno’s tortoise and Royce’s map,

For the medicinal smell of eucalyptus trees,

For speech, which can be taken for wisdom,

For forgetfulness, which annuls or modifies the past,

For habits,

Which repeat us and confirm us in our image like a mirror,

For morning, that gives us the illusion of a new beginning,

For night, its darkness and its astronomy,

For the bravery and happiness of others,

For my country, sensed in jasmine flowers

Or in an old sword,

For Whitman and Francis of Assisi, who already wrote this poem,

For the fact that the poem is inexhaustible

And becomes one with the sum of all created things

And will never reach its last verse

And varies according to its writers

For Frances Haslam, who begged her children’s pardon

For dying so slowly,

For the minutes that precede sleep,

For sleep and death,

Those two hidden treasures,

For the intimate gifts I do not mention,

For music, that mysterious form of time.

–  Jorge Luis Borges

Still the Mind

Art : Katia Chausheva

"What I am really saying is that you don't need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds,
the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy.
You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all."

-  Alan Watts, Still the Mind

Taking place around our world

 

 

 

"Without this world, we cannot attain enlightenment.

Without this world, there would be no journey.

By rejecting the world, we would be rejecting the ground and rejecting the path.

All our past history and all our neuroses are related with others in some sense.

All our experiences are based on others, basically.

As long as we have a sense of practice,

some realization that we are treading on the path,

every one of those little details, which are seeming obstacles to us,

becomes an essential part of the path.

Without them, we cannot attain anything at all – we have no feedback,

we have nothing to work with.

So in a sense all the things taking place around our world,

all the irritations and all the problems, are crucial."

- Chögyam Trungpa

Birth, old age, Sickness and death

"Birth, old age,
Sickness and death:

From the beginning,
This is the way
Things have always been.
Any thought
Of release from this life
Will wrap you more tightly
In its snares.
The sleeping person
Looks for a Buddha,
The troubled person
Turns toward meditation.
But the one who knows
That there's nothing to seek
Knows too that there's nothing to say.
She keeps her mouth closed."

~ Ly Ngoc Kieu (11th century), Vietnamese Buddhist nun & temple director; earliest known woman writer of Vietnam

(poem translated by Thich Nhat Hanh and Jane Hirshfield)

I Am Not Old



Photo : Riitta Ikonen and Norwegian photographer Karoline Hjorth

I Am Not Old


I am not old…she said
I am rare.
I am the standing ovation
At the end of the play.
I am the retrospective
Of my life as art
I am the hours
Connected like dots
Into good sense
I am the fullness
Of existing.
You think I am waiting to die…
But I am waiting to be found
I am a treasure.
I am a map.
And these wrinkles are
Imprints of my journey
Ask me anything.

- Samantha Reynolds

Relationship

"But only someone who is ready for everything,

who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible,

will live the relationship with another person as something alive

and will himself sound the depths of his own being."

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

THE SHELL

 

THE SHELL

An open sandy shell

on the beach

empty but beautiful

like a memory

of a protected previous self.

The most difficult griefs,

ones in which

we slowly open

to a larger sea, a grander

sweep that washes

all our elements apart.

So strange the way

we are larger

in grief

than we imagined

we deserved or could claim

and when loss floods

into us

like the long darkness it is

and the old nurtured hope

is drowned again,

even stranger then

at the edge of the sea,

to feel the hand of the wind

laid on our shoulder,

reminding us

how death grants

a fierce and fallen freedom

away from the prison

of a constant

and continued presence,

how in the end

those who have left us

might no longer need us,

with all our tears

and our much needed

measures of loss

and that their own death

is as personal

and private

as that life of theirs

which you never really knew,

and another disturbing thing,

that exultation

is possible

without them.

And they for themselves

in fact

are glad to have let go

of all the stasis

and the enclosure

and the need for them to live

like some prisoner

that you only wanted

to remain incurious

and happy in your love,

never looking for the key,

never wanting to

turn the lock and walk

away

like the wind,

unneedful of you,

ungovernable,

unnamable,

free.

THE SHELL.

From RIVER FLOW: New and Selected Poems

© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

"I'm going to miss you"

Art : Cheiko

Zen teacher Issan Dorsey, who established the Maitri Hospice in San Francisco,

was on his deathbed when one of his closest friends came to visit him.

"I'm going to miss you," the friend said.

"I'm going to miss you, too," responded Issan. He was silent for a moment.
Then he asked, "Are you going somewhere?"



- Sean Murphy
One Bird, One Stone