For moderns - for us - there is something illicit, it seems, about wasted time, the empty hours of contemplation when a thought unfurls, figures of speech budding and blossoming, articulation drifting like spent petals onto the dark table we all once gathered around to talk and talk, letting time get the better of us. _Just taking our time_, as we say. That is, letting time take us.
"Can you say," I once inquired of a sixty-year old cloistered nun who had lived (vibrantly, it seemed) from teh age of nineteen in her monastery cell, "what the core of contemplative life is?"
"Leisure," she said, without hesitation, her china blue eyes cheerfully steady on me. I suppose I expected her to say, "Prayer." Or maybe "The search for God." Or "Inner peace." Inner peace would have been good. One of the big-ticket items of spirituality.
She saw I didn't see.
"It takes time to do this," she said finally.
Her "this" being the kind of work that requires abdication from time's industrial purpose (doing things, getting things). By choosing leisure she had bid farewell to the fevered enterprise of getting-and-spending whereby, as the poet said, we lay waste our powers.
Tags: leisure spirituality meditation religious-life
With attachment all that seems to exist is just me
Sharon SalzbergTags: buddhism mindfulness meditation metta
To relinquish the futile effort to control change is one of the strengthening forces of true detachment
Sharon SalzbergTags: buddhism mindfulness meditation
Buddha first taught metta meditation as an antidote: as a way of surmounting terrible fear when it arises.
Sharon SalzbergTags: buddhism mindfulness meditation
Patience is both the tool for and the result of, our efforts.
Allan LokosTags: buddhism psychology mindfulness meditation
We are all in this together. Our happiness inextricably is tied to that of all beings.
Allan LokosTags: psychology meditation buddhsim shantideva
Our actions speak for us
Allan LokosTags: buddhism psychology meditation
Praise
Allan LokosTags: psychology meditation buddism
So what is a good meditator? A good meditator meditates.
Allan LokosTags: inspirational buddhism psychology self-help mindfulness yoga meditation
Metta is the ability to embrace all parts of ourselves, as well as all parts of the world. Practicing metta illuminates our inner integrity because it relieves us of the need to deny different aspects of ourselves. We can open to everything with the healing force of love. When we feel love, our mind is expansive and open enough to include the entirety of life in full awareness, both its pleasures and its pains, we feel neither betrayed by pain or overcome by it, and thus we can contact that which is undamaged within us regardless of the situation. Metta sees truly that our integrity is inviolate, no matter what our life situation may be.
Sharon SalzbergTags: love buddhism mindfulness meditation
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