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Posts from the ‘Mindfulness’ Category

Fortunate Hours

“There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.”― Mark Doty

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”― Alan Wilson Watts, The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts

Moments of stillness.
Quiet symphony.
Awake to beauty.
Drawn to light.
Pause here.
To root, anchor, steep.
Ordinary days.
Fortunate hours.

“Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by.”― Elizabeth Bishop

Panoramic Attention

“We find true refuge whenever we recognize the silent space of awareness behind all our busy doing and striving. We find refuge whenever our hearts open with tenderness and love. We find refuge whenever we connect with the innate clarity and intelligence of our true nature.”― Tara Brach, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

“The true Renaissance person is endowed with panoramic attention…. The habit of noticing the ensemble of everything and its constituent parts is a matter of will, not of innate aptitude. It involves the conscious noticing of things and the gaps that separate and connect them.”― Christy Wampole

An exchange.
A conversation.
Ebb and flow.
A broader view, deeper too.
An expanse, awakening.
To all that lies before us.
Noticing and responding in awe.
Found in the pause.
With honed senses to take it all in.
To be overwhelmed with reverence, with inquiry.
Filled with wonder.
To let go, making room to open, invite and welcome.
Aperture set to panoramic.
Enter this space.

“But Radical Acceptance also means not overlooking another important truth: the endless creativity and possibility that exist in living. By accepting the truth of change, accepting that we don’t know how our life will unfold, we open ourselves to hope so that we can move forward with vitality and will.”― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

The Habit of Pause

“What is God doing in my life? In the mornings, I wake to find that he has traced the world in silver. Every blade of grass. Each pumpkin on the porch. In the afternoons, I find him washing these fields with the mellow sunlight of autumn. He has gilded every rail in the fence and the sheet metal roof of the old red barn. He has transformed familiar trees into something otherworldly.”― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“Learning to pause is the first step in the practice of Radical Acceptance. A pause is a suspension of activity, a time of temporary disengagement when we are no longer moving toward any goal. . . . The pause can occur in the midst of almost any activity and can last for an instant, for hours or for seasons of our life. . . . We may pause in the midst of meditation to let go of thoughts and reawaken our attention to the breath. We may pause by stepping out of daily life to go on a retreat or to spend time in nature or to take a sabbatical. . . . You might try it now: Stop reading and sit there, doing “no thing,” and simply notice what you are experiencing.”― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

Pause, pray, reflect, meditate, sit.
Whatever you want to call it.
The necessity to stop, to create space, to look at beauty, blessings, light.
Amidst struggle, worry, rush.
In the slowing.
In the witnessing.
In the quiet.
A soft clear reminder of what always has been true.
You are loved.
Love is the call on all our lives.
The power of the pause.

“You must try to pray so that, in your prayer, you open yourself in such a way that sometime—perhaps not today, but sometime—you are able to hear God say to you, “I love you!” These words, addressed to you by God, are the most important words you will ever hear because, before you hear them, nothing is ever completely right with you, but after you hear them, something will be right in your life at a very deep level.”― Ronald Rolheiser, Prayer: Our Deepest Longing

A Simple Yet Profound Pause

“There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life.”― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

“May I be filled with lovingkindness; may I be held in lovingkindness.
May I feel safe and at ease.
May I feel protected from inner and outer harm.
May I be happy.
May I accept myself just as I am.
May I touch deep, natural peace.
May I know the natural joy of being alive.
May I find true refuge within my own being.
May my heart and mind awaken; may I be free.”
― Tara Brach, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

A pause.
To open.
Observe.
Inquire.
Rest.
Reset.
Allow.
Shift attention.
Create intention.
Invite.
Lovingkindness.
Like the tide, moving in and out.
Breathing.
Nowhere to be than in this moment.
The joy of being alive.
The awareness of thin spaces.
The mountains meeting the sky.
Transcendent woven in ordinary time.
In a simple pause.
Profound.

“Mindfulness is the intentional process of paying attention, without judgment, to the unfolding”― Tara Brach, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

The Wholeness of this Day

“God does not erase our losses, those empty places in our lives, but he does something almost more miraculous. He fills the loss with a sign of his presence.”― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“If I want to abide in this day, to make my home in it, I must only tear my eyes from tomorrow and look around. For there is a wholeness to this day that I do not want to miss.”― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

Root and reach.
Rest and flow.
Ease and effort.
Find the sacred holy ground of this day.
Remain here to notice, to pay attention.
In deep long gazes.
In the lift from laughter.
In the small adding up to a good life, moments at a time.
And for honed senses to witness and partake in the present.

“Our lives are stories built of small moments. Ordinary experiences. It is too easy to forget that our days are adding up to something astonishing. We do not often stop to notice the signs and wonders. The writing on the wall. But some days we do.”― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

Ten Times

“Listen, whatever you see and love—
that’s where you are.”― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

“Ten times a day something happens to me like this – some strengthening throb of amazement – some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”― Mary Oliver

Ten, maybe even twenty.
But start with ten and see where it goes.
Ten still points, pauses, stop signs.
Look around longer with fresh eyes, open heart.
Amazement. Wonder. Delight.
Praise. Gratitude. Reverence.
Ten, maybe even twenty. Or more.
Attention. Awareness. Awaken.

“Sometimes I dream
that everything in the world is here, in my room,
in a great closet, named and orderly,

and I am here too, in front of it,
hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness—
and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing;
and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.”
― Mary Oliver

To Wonder, To Wander

“You have the power to live in the now despite that inner nudge pushing you out of the moment toward perfection and productivity.” – Rachel Macy Stafford, Hands Free Life

“…which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider’s, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?”― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

What causes you to wonder?
Go there each day for a visit.
As close as a walk, the sky, a glance.
Creating rather than production.
Imperfect effort over perfect stasis.
Wander, pause, allow.
Be filled with awe.
Completely awake and thrown out of the nest of complacency and busyness.
Feed yourself, feed the world.
Wonder, awe, delight to you this day.
Found in the wandering and the wondering.

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance

The Slow Work

“The whole life lies in the verb seeing.”― Teilhard de Chardin

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.” – Mary Oliver, House of Light

May inspiration lead to motion.
Love to action.
Seeing as if for the first time.
Slow steady work.
Currents always moving.
Some seasons on the shoreline.
To ready for reentry.
Whether we see it or not, we are changing.
We either resist or succumb to the unfolding within.
Make yourself a light.
Heed the call, the whisper.
Emergence at work.

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Slow and Easy

“Slow down and enjoy life. It’s not only the scenery you miss by going to fast – you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.” – Eddie Cantor

“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.”― Rollo May

Slow down.
Let your imagination saunter and wander.
Allow quiet spaces to hear your own voice.
Anchor in today.
See beauty and light.
There’s fun to be had.
Play to partake in.
Slow and easy.

“What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?”― Rollo May

Revery

“Where there are bees there are flowers, and wherever there are flowers there is new life and hope.”― Christy Lefteri, The Beekeeper of Aleppo

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

We are onto the next thing before the thing before us is barely started or over.
Passing by quickly in search of what’s next.
As if we could find it when we can’t see the bounty that is already before us.
In loss, we miss what we already had.
No do overs.
Live twice.
Once in the moment.
Again in the memory.
Be where you are right now fully.
In the imperfection, beauty, messiness and awe.
Reverence. Wonder. Revery.

“Mindfulness is simply being aware of what is happening right now without wishing it were different.” – James Baraz