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

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'

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

"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

Meeting Life with Gratefulness

Père Lachaise Cemetery Paris - Letters from the other side

"I am grateful for this precious life."

"I am grateful for this old and beautiful earth."

"I am grateful for the holy gift of friendship."

"I am grateful that I have the heart to serve."

"I am grateful for the silence and stillness that join us."

"I am grateful for those hard lessons learned."

"I am grateful for every given day."

"I am grateful for you."

Paris 13. 11. 15