Tag: Mini Mindfulness Break

Don’t Go to War

We come upon our greediness, jealousy, or impatience, and the next impulse is to go to war with it. We don’t realize that all the while we’re strengthening the thing we’re fighting against. It’s like trying to push a beach ball into the water. Holding it down requires a huge amount of energy, and inevitably it pops back up with equal force, taking an unpredictable direction. But if you give the beach ball space and let it be, it will float effortlessly along the surface.

– Aura Glaser, “Into the Demon’s Mouth”

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For Peace

Why do I consider it so crucial to balance the outer aspects of nonviolence and compassion with the inner support of contemplative practice? Because in the end, all politics are local, and we cannot love life and humanity if we do not love each other, one on one.

– Lama Surya Das, “Why Sit?”

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Learning from Relationships

You do not learn non-attachment by disengaging and avoiding the intensity of relationships, their joy and their pain. It is easy to disguise as non-attachment what is not non-attachment at all, but your fear of attachment. When you really care about someone and you are willing to commit to that friendship, then you have fertile ground to learn about both attachment and non-attachment.

– Judy Lief, “Tying the Knot”

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Renounce Your Self-Importance

Buddhism means not being concerned with whether you’re seen as a hot-shot Dalai Lama, or a hot-shot Pope, or a hot-shot parent, or even a halfway decent anything. . . . The ego is just a construct. Get over it.

– Christine Cox, “The Groucho Moment “

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To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle; every cubic inch of space is a miracle. Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same. . . . What strange miracles are these! Everywhere . . .

– Walt Whitman

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The Poets of Ch’an Buddhism

Delusion vs. Enlightenment
That the self advances and confirms the ten thousand things / is called delusion; / That the ten thousand things advance and confirm the self / is called enlightenment.

– Dogen Zenji, ” Wandering Clouds: The Poets of Ch’an Buddhism “

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Can Occupy Wall Street succeed? It can, if it continues to place generosity and compassion before greed, and to recognize the power of interdependence, causality and selflessness.

– Roshi Joan Halifax and Maia Duerr

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Like archeologists, we have to dig down through the layers of self-deception and denial to get to something that is deeply and brilliantly true.

– Martha Beck, WIL 2017

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Practice from Strength

You lack nothing. You lack nothing, therefore you practice. Therefore you must realize and manifest this no-lack, this realized life, this awakened life that you are.

– Elihu Genmyo Smith, “No Need to Do Zazen, Therefore Must Do Zazen”

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Right now, many of us feel an immense shift in the way humans live in this world. That shift, while benevolent, comes from within, rather than from our culture. That means your inner compass will inevitably tell you to break society’s expectations. Maybe that’s happening right now. If not, wait a few minutes. It’s coming.

– Compass v. Culture…Insight From Martha

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