“Many people think excitement is happiness…. But when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace.”
“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.
“When you are born a lotus flower, be a beautiful lotus flower, don’t try to be a magnolia flower.
“If you crave acceptance and recognition and try to change yourself to fit what other people want you to be, you will suffer all your life. True happiness and true power lie in understanding yourself, accepting yourself, having confidence in yourself.”
“When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be filled with acceptance, joy, peace and love…
“Around us, life bursts with miracles–a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops.
“If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles.
“Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings.
“When we are tired and feel discouraged by life’s daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there.”
“To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the future.
The idea is simply not to allow yourself to get lost in regrets about the past or worries about the future.
If you are firmly grounded in the present moment, the past can be an object of inquiry, the object of your mindfulness and concentration. You can attain many insights by looking into the past. But you are still grounded in the present moment.”
No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering
“The function of mindfulness is, first, to recognize the suffering and then to take care of the suffering.
The work of mindfulness is first to recognize the suffering and second to embrace it. A mother taking care of a crying baby naturally will take the child into her arms without suppressing, judging it, or ignoring the crying.
Mindfulness is like that mother, recognizing and embracing suffering without judgement.
So the practice is not to fight or suppress the feeling, but rather to cradle it with a lot of tenderness.
When a mother embraces her child, that energy of tenderness begins to penetrate into the body of the child.
Even if the mother doesn’t understand at first why the child is suffering and she needs some time to find out what the difficulty is, just her act of taking the child into her arms with tenderness can already bring relief.
If we can recognize and cradle the suffering while we breathe mindfully, there is relief already.”
“When we are angry, what do we usually do? We shout, scream, and try to blame someone else for our problems. But looking at anger with the eyes of impermanence, we can stop and breathe.
Angry at each other in the ultimate dimension, we close our eyes and look deeply. We try to see three hundred years into the future. What will you be like? What will I be like? Where will you be? Where will I be?
We need only to breathe in and out, look at our future and at the other person’s future.
Looking at the future, we see that the other person is very precious to us. When we know we can lose them at any moment, we are no longer angry.
We want to embrace her or him and say: “How wonderful, you are still alive. I am so happy. How could I be angry with you? Both of us have to die someday, and while we are still alive and together it is foolish to be angry at each other.”
The reason we are foolish enough to make ourselves suffer and make the other person suffer is that we forget that we and the other person are impermanent.
Someday when we die we will lose all our possessions, our power, our family, everything.
Our freedom, peace, and joy in the present moment is the most important thing we have.”
“NO MUD, NO LOTUS. Both suffering and happiness are of an organic nature, which means they are both transitory; they are always changing.
The flower, when it wilts, becomes the compost. The compost can help grow a flower again.
Happiness is also organic and impermanent by nature. It can become suffering and suffering can become happiness again.”
Grokking with LodRose! 