Before Guyana I had always imagined that more choices were better. I had never expected to find relief in what I couldn’t have.
~ Katherine Jamison from article in Yoga+ Joyful Living Magazine
Two traveling monks reached a river where they met a young woman. Wary of the current, she asked if they could carry her across. One of the monks hesitated, but the other quickly picked her up onto his shoulders, transported her across the water, and put her down on the other bank.
She thanked him and departed. As the monks continued on their way, the one was brooding and preoccupied. Unable to hold his silence, he spoke out. “Brother, our spiritual training teaches us to avoid any contact with women, but you picked that one up on your shoulders and carried her!” “Brother,” the second monk replied, “I set her down on the other side, while you are still carrying her.”
~Found via The Zen Frog blog
“Living with a busy family, I often feel just like one of the Tibetan monks I once saw making an intricately designed sand mandala. For months, they bent over the ground, arranging the sand grain by grain, and once their beautiful creation was complete, they cheerfully destroyed it in the ultimate celebration of impermanence.
While I don’t create ceremonial mandalas, I do wash the dishes. And when I come back to the sink later, dirty dishes have appeared again. I fold and put away a basketful of laundry, and in no time, the basket is full again. Even my yoga mat is a reminder of impermanence. Just this morning, it was stretched out on the floor, filled up with my movements, and now it leans against the wall, empty and forlorn.
As the Buddha said, impermanence is the nature of the human condition. This is a truth we know in our minds but tend to resist in our hearts. Change happens all around us, all the time, yet we long for the predictable, the consistent. We want the reassurance that comes from things remaining the same. We find ourselves shocked when people die, even though death is the most predictable part of life.”
“Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time—when pursued like a bandit—will behave like one; always remaining in one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you’re banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only the burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you.”
~ EAT,PRAY,LOVE by Elizabeth Gilbert
“An analogy for bodhichitta is the rawness of a broken heart. Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment, and blame. But under the hardness of that armor there is the tenderness of genuine sadness. This is our link with all those who have ever loved. This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we’re arrogant and soften us when we are unkind. It awakens us when we prefer to sleep and pierces through our indifference. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing that when accepted fully can be shared with all.”
~ THE PLACES THAT SCARE YOU by Pema Chodron
“Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, has written about what he calls “the tyranny of freedom,” arguing that the sheer volume of choices in American life has come to feel oppressive and overwhelming: the proliferation ratchets up expectations and anxieties (there’s always something better around the corner) and overloads the psyche..
…The mathematics of desire mitigates precisely that anxiety. A woman-particularly a woman who feels fundamentally disempowered and uncertain-makes up new rules, replaces external constraints with internal ones, installs systems of mastery that operate from the inside out, the tyranny of freedom reconfigured as the tyranny of self.”
~APPETITES by Caroline Knapp
“We are citizens of two worlds – the outer world of names and forms and the inner world of thoughts and desires, emotions. To be free, we must learn to act skillfully according to our objective knowledge of both worlds.”
~THE HEART AND SCIENCE OF YOGA by Pelmutter
