Inside and Outside
"Take a few minutes now to just listen to and become aware of your surroundings."
~ Adyashanti
Do This One Thing Now
"Just get up from your desk
and open the window,
keep silent until you hear three
sounds you've never heard before,
run your tongue around your mouth,
smell the air."
~ Sarah Salway
Experiencing Food More Intensely
In the eyes of some experts, what seems like the simplest of acts — eating slowly and genuinely relishing each bite — could be the remedy for a fast-paced Paula Deen Nation in which an endless parade of new diets never seems to slow a stampede toward obesity.
~ Jeff Gordinier
Put Your Tush to the Cush
"These days, meditation for me is like brushing my teeth."
~ Brad Warner
More Like the Mona Lisa than Everything Else
"We tend to explain success and failure is by looking at the attributes of the thing or the person that succeeded or failed. And what I argue – and the Mona Lisa is just a way of illustrating this general argument – is that these explanations are actually vacuous, right? They're logically circular."
~ Duncan Watts
Traveling Light
Five strategies for reducing travel stress -- especially around the holidays -- by Allan Lokos, from "Peace While Traveling? Not Impossible," by Rachel Lee Harris, The New York Times, December 15, 2011.
Listen to Music, Hear Your Thoughts
By default, most of us have developed a stunning and sophisticated repertoire for blocking out the world around us. We allocate the bulk of our attention inwardly toward the stories playing out in our minds.
Waiting for the Weekend
isn’t there some value in motivating ourselves through unpleasant tasks and activities by imagining the relief that will follow? Is there really anything wrong with taking a bit of comfort during a tedious meeting or lecture on Wednesday morning by imagining how much fun we’re planning to have on Friday evening?
If You Lived Here…
One good definition of suffering is the wish for our current circumstances to be different than they are, which means that most of us suffer a great deal of the time. The degree to which we suffer fluctuates based on the gulf between how things are and our idea of a more perfect set of circumstances. The resistance to accepting what is happening right now takes energy. No wonder why so many of us frequently report feeling exhausted.
Thinking Isn’t Personal
"
A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but the attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.
Most people think that they are what their thoughts tell them they are."
~ Byron Katie
The Hidden Discipline of Familiarity
"Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity."
~ David Whyte
The Monastery Will Come to Each of Us
"Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to do intensive formal meditation practice. Why should they? Isn’t there enough physical and emotional discomfort in ordinary life? Why intentionally seek it out?
But the monastery will come to each of us when we have to confront our fears, losses, compulsions and anxieties, or process the aftermath of trauma. The monastery comes to us in the form of emotional crisis, illness or injury, a phobia or a failed relationship. The question is whether we will be in a position to recognize and use it as such."
~ Shinzen Young
Suffering Bodies
"You'll find lot of communities which are based on the word, thus to say we speak of an ideal together and we are committed to an ideal or to a vision and so on. But L'Arche is based on body and on suffering bodies."
~ Jean Vanier