If you commit yourself to spending some time each day in inner stillness, even if it is for two minutes, or five, or ten, for those moments you are stepping out of the flow of time altogether. The stillness and calm, the sense of well-being and wakeful presence that come from letting go of time transform your experience of time when you move back into it. Then, simply by bringing awareness to present-moment experience, it becomes possible to flow along with time during your day rather than constantly fighting against it or feeling driven by it.

Non-doing is a radical stance to adopt, even for one moment. It means letting go of our attachment to everything. Above all, it means seeing and letting go of your thoughts as they come and go. It means letting yourself be. In doing so, you also step out, at least momentarily, from your isolation, you unhappiness, and your desire to be engaged, busy, a part of things, doing something meaningful. By connecting with yourself outside the flow of time, you are already doing the most meaningful thing you could possibly do, namely to come to peace within your own mind, coming into contact with you own wholeness, reconnecting with yourself.

~Jon Kabat-Zinn

ever get caught up in time’s distortions?

inquiry for today~   how much of your experience will you ignore today? how much beauty will go unnoticed?

your own version of you

The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To love fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened view, that’s life. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together. We want to be perfect, but we just keep seeing our imperfections, and there is no room to get away from that, no exit, nowhere to run. That is when this sword turns into a flower. We stick with what we see, we feel what we feel, and and from that we begin to connect with our own wisdom mind.

~Pema Chödrön