Soothed by the Bell
Why is the sound of a mindfulness bell such a great warm up for any attentional fitness workout?
There is Really No Such Thing as Thought, There is Only Thinking
Life moves, undulates, breathes in and out, contracting and expanding. This is its nature, the nature of what is. Whatever is, is on the move. Nothing remains the same for very long.
The mind wants everything to stop so that it can get its foothold, find its position, so it can figure out how to control life. Through the pursuit of material things, knowledge, ideas, beliefs, opinions, emotional states, spiritual states, and relationships, the mind seeks to find a secure position from which to operate.
~ Adyashanti
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
Feeling Slightly Out of It Most of the Time
"actually, it may be that just being yourself as a human being means feeling slightly out of it most of the time. And that a form of enlightenment is to understand that you'll never feel quite at home in the world and you're not meant to, because your sense of compassion for the rest of creation and for others depends on your understanding of exile — how far a creature, especially a human creature, can feel from true parentage, from their true inheritance, from their true home."
~ David Whyte
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.