Done by choice

Here's a concluding remark by Laura Silva Quesada to a little article she wrote about meditation:

Meditation is done by choice, and is vital for overall well-being. It improves the quality of your health, relationships, job performance, creativity, and problem solving ability. It also allows for you to make better choices and decisions. With meditation you can make the most of your life, and enjoy it, and those you share it with to the fullest.

I really like the emphasis on choice. Choosing to meditate actually puts us more in touch with all our choices and is profoundly empowering.
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Dedication

This is dedicated to all who died in Newtown, Connecticut and all who mourn.



This may come across as a little sentimental to some and, frankly, I don't like the background music ---- and, yet, I think this woman has some good stuff to offer.
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Well, it's about impermanence, isn't it?

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Silence in December

It's so hard to be silent this time of year, I know. It's really worth it, however. And because of all the frantic busyness, we need silence during this season more than ever:

Silence will help you avoid engaging in the games of competition and illusion that regularly seduce us in the outside world. Silence also helps you avoid distraction. It helps focus the busy mind---the mind that always has to be doing something, thinking something, the mind that always has to be otherwise engaged lest it become introspective and allow the soul's voice to override its own. The silence I am describing is a silence that you use to contain the grace you receive when you enter the Castle of your soul. This quality of silence allows you to engage in discernment. You carry this silence within you, even when you are with others. It allows you to hold your center amid the chaos of your life; it keeps you clear so that you do not do or say things you will regret or make decisions out of fear.

 -- Carolyn Myss

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Echoes of the spirit

A few years ago I gave myself a copy of Small Graces by Kent Nerburn for Christmas. Here's an excerpt that I stumbled upon not too long ago:

I try always to look upon the world and the people I meet as echoes of my spirit. I know that if I am speaking with deceit, deceit will be echoed back to me . . . Likewise, if I find that I am constantly cheerful, full of brightness and hope, or deeply contemplative in the presence of a particular person, I know I am in the presence of a gracious spirit, and I am echoing the gift that is being given to me. It is as if the lesson of the echo contains the secret to understanding the space between us all. 

This is really valuable to ponder as we are starting to come to the close of the old year and soon will be welcoming the new.
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Something to ponder

Being together

Found on Facebook. Words to live by. REALLY.

Ah.... So very true

A classic saying

One that's very, very true!  I found it right here on Etsy.

The way to live

Oh, I really like this. You can get one at Etsy right here.

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How to let go of misery

This is so, so true.

Here is a formula for misery: resist a fact. Lament something that has occurred, dwelling on how it could have been otherwise. 

If you were to altogether let go of resistance this moment, never to start it up again, by that single gesture, you’d liberate yourself from an enormous burden of suffering. Whatever time remains would feel conspicuously different from all that has preceded.  

Allowing reality to be itself means you no longer blame life for your inner condition—or credit it, if things are going well. The potential exists to be at peace no matter what.

Confronted with reality, there are two options. You can acknowledge the fact of it, without resistance, or you can argue with it. When you oppose reality in any way, you’re taking on a terrible weight, which you then carry. It becomes a part of you. The burden wears you out.

It's from a book entitled The Freedom of Being at Ease with What Is by Jan Fazier.
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Skillful means

This is similar to the observation that you can't pave the whole world with leather but you can wear sandals on your feet!

Really great self-care

This is good stuff, people.

(Click to enlarge)

Encouragement

This distills matters beautifully, don't you think?

Something about Inner peace

Here is definitely the headline for the day (from the Washington Post, by the way):

Eckhart Tolle, meditation and the meaning and benefits of inner peace

 Please note this excerpt:

Humanity, says Tolle, is faced with a choice of finding new ways to live together or continuing the cycle of violence and conflict.  “If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.”  

It's a short article. I do recommend clicking through!
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Ten minutes to change your life (really)

I think I've posted this before but, if I have, it's been quite a long time. What I want to share with you is a practice the Dalai Lama recommends. It's quite beautiful:

1. Spend 5 minutes at the beginning of each day remembering we all want the same things (to be happy and be loved) and we are all connected to one another.

2. Spend 5 minutes - breathing in - cherishing yourself and, breathing out - cherishing others. If you think about people you have difficulty cherishing, extend your cherishing to them anyway.

3. During the day extend that attitude to everyone you meet. Practice cherishing the simplest person (clerks, attendants, etc.) as well as the "important" people in your life; cherish the people you love and the people you dislike.

4. Continue this practice no matter what happens or what anyone does to you.

These thoughts are very simple, inspiring and helpful. The practice of cherishing can be taken very deep if done wordlessly, allowing yourself to feel the love and appreciation that already exists in your heart.

I happened to find a handout with this exercise on it as I was cleaning house a while ago. I'm really glad I did.
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Mindfulness, memory and reveiw

I found this exercise on "Meditation Station". This form of meditation makes a lot of sense. It is similar to Rob Nairn's instruction on "backtracking" that he talks about in Diamond Mind. I've also read about similar techniques offered by psychologists as a means of cultivating better memory. Let's all give this a try and see if it doesn't help us cultivate more ordinary mindfulness throughout our day! 

Every night, before falling asleep, review the events of the day. Start with the first thing you remember and then continue as if you were watching a movie starring you. Try to remember everything. For instance, you may remember the alarm going off and you turning it off, pulling down the blanket and swinging your legs over the side of the bed to get out of bed. You may have then walked into the bathroom and washed up prior to getting dressed. Try to remember every detail as precisely as possible. Don't simply rehash how you usually go through your life's routine but rather note each nuance. An example would be if you dropped the bar of soap when you were washing up or heard alarming news over the radio while brushing your teeth. Try to recall how you reacted physically, mentally, and emotionally to every event of the day. 

When you first try this technique, you may be amazed at how little you can recall. It may become obvious that you can easily recall highly emotional times like when you had an argument with a co-worker but you may not be able to remember anything about how you got to work. Similarly, if you had an accident in your car on the way to work, the events of that incident may be all you can remember. Anything that happened at work would be a blur. 

The more you do this "review of the day", the more you will start paying attention to your life as it takes place and the more you will be able to remember about the events that transpired. We all have a tendency to not pay anything but the most minimal attention to the here and now and instead spend our time rehashing the past and fantasizing about the future. This meditation technique can return our awareness of the present, which is the only time reality takes place, as well as bring an excitement and enthusiasm to our life. Think about a baby who is so amazed and fascinated with the newness of everything that occurs in every moment. We should be experiencing at least that exquisite a response to our moment-to-moment existence because each moment is absolutely unique and intriguing and since we are adults, we can ponder the remarkable way we are reacting to each event we experience physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. 

When we can pay attention to our life with a baby's intensity, we will also find that when we do our daily life review, our mind will replay it in a minute detail and completeness as if we had put our inner VCR on fast forward. In just a few minutes, we will be able to see every event that took place in the previous sixteen hours. This will occur because at this stage of our consciousness's evolution, our mind will be a tool we can use as reliably and more easily than any computer. 
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Dissolving fear

Did you ever think that gratitude could help dissolve fear? See what the wonderful website Gratefulness.org has to say about that:

Peace, rightly understood, is inseparable from gratefulness. When we are grateful, we peacefully accept what is. As long as we are merely thankful, we give thanks for what we perceive to be beneficial, but there always remains the lurking fear that something harmful may come our way instead. To be grateful is more. It is our courageous trust that life itself – kind or harsh, happy or sad -- is good, if only we receive it as gift.

The moment we trust in this truth, we are at peace. A person at peace will serve as an agent of peace in the world.

Activism for peace is necessary. Yet no matter how sincere and how admirable, it will have no effect unless our own heart is at peace, because gratefulness has made us fearless.

Since fear is at the root of all that is wrong with our world, we start healing the world by overcoming fear through gratefulness.

I am in a daily state of gratefulness about meditation. The fact that I am a meditator, that I have had the wonderful good fortune to have received meditation instruction, fills me with gratitude. No matter what else is going on in our lives, no matter what challenges beset us, we can be grateful for our meditative practice.
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This says it all, dear people. Really.

Right here:‎

"See it clearly without judgement and let it go. Come back to the present moment. From now on until the moment of your death, you could do this." 

 -- Pema Chödrön 

Yes, in a way it sounds difficult. In another way, it sounds (is) so doable. So let us take heart!
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