You Are IT

Mindfulness is the energy of being aware and awake to the present moment. It is the continuous practice of touching life deeply in every moment of daily life. To be mindful is to be truly alive and present with those around you and with what you are doing. We bring our body and mind into harmony while we wash the dishes, drive the car or take our morning cup of tea.

~ Thích Nhất Hạnh

It has been said that the highest wisdom lies in detachment, or, in the words of Chung-Tzu, ‘The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.’

Detachment means to have neither regrets for the past nor fears for the future; to let life take its course without attempting to interfere with its movement and change, neither trying to prolong the stay of something pleasant nor to hasten the departure of things unpleasant.

To do this is to move in time with life, to be in perfect accord with its changing music, and this is called Enlightenment. In short, it is to be detached from both the past and future and to live in the eternal Now.

For in truth neither past nor future have any existence apart from this Now; by themselves they are illusions. Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists for ever.

~ Alan Watts

Aging gives us a chance to learn to use the shadows in our life as vehicles for our awakening — and the longest shadow of all is death.

How you relate to death is the key spiritual work of aging. And how you see death is a function of how much you identify with that which dies.

Egos die.

~ Ram Dass

I met the Buddha on the road
and tried to kill him…

But he used some Ninja stuff and
beat me. He took my wallet,

not the money, just threw out
all my photo ID.

Then he helped me up, put his
arm around me and we stumbled

to a working class bar
where we sat all night in the back room

sipping Wild Turkey,
laughing about our minds:

how they invented suffering,
how they invented happiness,

how they invented “good” and “evil”
and their need for education,

how they invented “God” and finally
“authority,” then gave it away

to some empty suit they never
even met in Washington DC,

how they invented War, my God,
how they invented War…

Gray dawn, rainy day, no flower.
Buddha slipped away.

I wondered if I hadn’t just been
talking to myself all night.

~ Fred LaMotte

If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology.

But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God’s name, it was bad theology.

~ Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

Whenever the energy of anger comes up, we often want to express it to punish the person whom we believe to be the source of our suffering.

This is the habit energy in us.

When we suffer, we always blame the other person for having made us suffer. We do not realize that anger is, first of all, our business.

We are primarily responsible for our anger, but we believe very naively that if we can say something or do something to punish the other person, we will suffer less.

This kind of belief should be uprooted. Because whatever you do or say in a state of anger will only cause more damage in the relationship.

Instead, we should try not to do anything or say anything when we are angry.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

When you enjoy every step,
you walk as a free person on this earth.
Breathing in, you may walk two or three steps,
and you may feel, ‘I have arrived, I have arrived.’

I have arrived in the here and the now, where life is available.
I have arrived means, ‘I don’t want to run anymore.
I have run all my life; now it is time to lead my life properly,
so that every step brings me home, where I can touch life deeply…’

Breathing out you may make three or four steps,
and you may feel, ‘I am home, home, home.’
This is not a verbal declaration: it is a realization.
Every step brings you home to the present moment
where all the wonders of life are available and your body is available….

Walk in such a way that you are not looking
for something else in the future.
You are touching the Kingdom of God.
You are touching the Land of the Buddha
in the here and the now.

Walk as if you kiss Mother Earth with your foot.
Every step is healing.
Every step is a miracle.

~Thich Naht Hanh, Plum Village, France, 6/2/2012

See yourself in all that lives and your behaviour will express your vision. Once you realize that there is nothing in this world which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside, as you look at a play on the stage, or a picture on the screen, admiring and enjoying, but really unmoved.

As long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing among things, actually existing in time and space, shortlived and vulnerable, naturally you will be anxious to survive and increase.

But when you know yourself as beyond space and time, in contact with them only at the point of here and now, otherwise all-pervading and all-containing, unapproachable, unassailable, invulnerable, you will be afraid no longer.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

The fundamental aim of Buddhist practice is not belief; it’s enlightenment, the awakening that takes place when illusion has been overcome.

It may sound simple, but it’s probably the most difficult thing of all to achieve. It isn’t some kind of magical reward that someone can give you or that a strong belief will enable you to acquire.

The true path to awakening is genuine discernment; it’s the very opposite of belief.

~ Trinlyay Tulku Rinpoche

When your mind is trained in self-discipline, even if you are surrounded by hostile forces, your peace of mind will hardly be disturbed. On the other hand, your mental peace and calm can easily be disrupted by your own negative thoughts and emotions. The real enemy is within, not outside.

~ The Dalai Lama