Because love, compassion and joy can lead to excessive attachment, they need to be balanced with equanimity. Because equanimity can lead to excessive detachment, it needs to be balanced with love, compassion and joy. Together, they express optimal mental harmony. At rest, consciousness is peaceful and open. This is natural equanimity. When our peaceful heart meets other beings it fills with love. When this love meets pain, it becomes compassion. When love meets happiness, it becomes joy.

~Jack Kornfield

and from the pit of truth in action comes an innocence that breathes…..

inquiry for today~   find your spiral from love to joy through despair and confusion….

what we see in the stars

I’m no longer surprised

to look up and see others,

beautiful tired others,

climbing or descending

alongside me.

All of us building

our way out of pain

or fleeing the exquisite

trapeze of our dreams.

All this scurrying for deep

serious purpose, only to find

a little bench from which

to glimpse the unseeable

wave of everything.

And all along

it’s been God’s trick

to dissolve what we want

like rice in rain until

exhaustion is the prayer

against our will

that drops us

into peace.

~Mark Nepo