Mindfulbalance

As Chögyam Trungpa said: “We forget that our ordinary, everyday life is the real teaching”

My God,

I pray better to You by breathing.

I pray better to You by walking, than by talking.

Thomas Merton

The Sabbath, a regular day of rest, had disappeared as a cultural institution from the secular world I lived in.

We let it slip from our fingers sometime in the past thirty years or so. Our hurry-up, twenty-four-hour-a-day lives will not allow Sabbaths, or spiritual resting places, and so time seems to fly ever faster, and we constantly feel we have less and less of it.

A permanent sense of lost or wasted time seems to haunt us, no matter how successful we are. “If only I had the time” becomes a constant refrain.

Gaby Eberle, Sacred Time and the Search for Meaning

When you encounter difficulties, the feelings and stories that arise in reaction are just that, feelings and stories. They are whirlwinds of confusion, based not in what is happening now but in deeply held beliefs about you and your relationship to the world.

Let them swirl – leaves in the wind.

Sometimes you fall back into them and lose touch with the present, but a moment of recognition always comes. Right then, come back to your body, come back to your breath, and rest.

The confusion, the stories and the feelings are still there. They continue to swirl, but you are not lost in them

Ken McLeod, Reflections on Silver River,

The tree is made strong and resilient by its grounded root system. These roots take nourishment from the ground and grow strong. Grounding also allows the tree to be resilient so that it can yield to the winds of change and not be uprooted. Springiness is the facility to ground and ‘unground’ in a rhythmical way. This buoyancy is a dynamic form of grounding.

Peter Levine, Walking the Tiger

All things, including grass and trees, are soft and pliable in life;
dry and brittle in death.

Stiffness is thus a companion of death,
flexibility a companion of life

Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching 76