You Are IT

Dear Buddha, since I have been able to return home to myself and recognize the root of my suffering in the realm of my perceptions, I no longer blame God or human beings for my suffering. I am able to listen to the suffering of others and help them recognize that the root of their suffering lies in their perceptions. I shall use the practice of deep listening and compassionate listening to increase my ability to understand and love people. I shall not blame them. I know that once I have understood people I am able to accept them and to love them….I will be able to let go of wrong perceptions, I will be happy and free.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Religion began with the intuition that awareness is the womb of creation. Worship began with the feeling that each breath is a journey home.

Later, the mind added creeds, scriptures, rituals, priests, and "levels of consciousness" just to feel a sense of its own importance.

Dare for a moment to let go of your religion, your philosophy, and all your beliefs: simply be aware as you follow one breath all the way in to your heart, and all the way out to silence.

That silence may only last for a moment, but it is full of eternity. That moment, you are in the beginning. You are re-created.

~ Fred LaMotte

Detachment and calm give us a larger space, inside and outside of us. This space, we can also offer it to those we love. We need to detach ourselves from our problems, of our problems, our worries and our regrets. And, create space around us. Space is freedom.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether.

~ Pema Chodron

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.

~ Matthew 5:14

I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

~ Philippians 4:12

Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder.
Help someone’s soul heal.
Walk out of your house like a shepherd.

~ Rumi

Sometimes there is a hum or low rumble in our environment, like a refrigerator or heater unit. When it stops, there is a kind of open, spacious quality and a sense of relief. Meditation is like that. Basically we sit and think and think and think; then occasionally that noisy mind stops for a moment and we experience a kind of open, spacious quality and a sense of relief. We can’t manufacture it and we can’t hold onto it. In Shambhala we call it “suddenly free from fixed mind.”

~ David Nichtern

When we wake up to how human life on this planet actually is, and stop running away or building walls in our heart, then we develop a wiser motivation for our life. And we keep waking up as the natural dukkha [suffering] touches us.

This means that we sharpen our attention to catch our instinctive reactions of blaming ourselves, blaming our parents, or blaming society; we meditate and access our suffering at its root; and consequently we learn to open and be still in our heart.

–Ajahn Sucitto

Bliss has no counterpart to it. That is the first thing to understand. Pleasure has pain, happiness has unhappiness, but bliss has nothing as a counterpart; it is an organic whole. Buddha used to say, ‘If you taste the ocean from anywhere, it is salty.’ So is the case with the bliss: you can taste it from any corner, from any space, from any direction – it is just blissfulness. There is nothing opposite to it. Bliss is the only experience in life which has no polar opposite to it.

~ Osho