It is my experience that awareness gives us back to ourselves. It is the only force I know that can do so. It is the quintessence of intelligence, physical, emotional, and moral. It seems as if it needs to be conjured up but in actuality, it is here all the time, only to be discovered, recovered, embraced, settled into. This where the refining comes in, in remembering. And then, in the letting go and the letting be, resting in- in the words of the great Japanese poet Ryokan, “just this, just this.” This is what is meant by the practice of mindfulness.

The challenge is twofold: first, to bring awareness to our moments as best we can, in even little and fleeting ways; second, to sustain our awareness and one to know it better and live inside its larger, never-ever-diminished wholeness. When we do, we see thoughts liberate themselves, even in the midst deep sorrow, as when we reach out and touch a soap bubble. Puff. It is gone. We see sorrow liberate itself, even as we act to soothe it in others and rest in the poignancy of what is. In this freedom, we can meet anything and everything with greater openness. We can hold the challenges we face now with greater fortitude, patience, and clarity. We already live in a bigger reality, one we can draw from by embracing pain and sorrow, when they arise, with wise and loving presence, with awareness, with uncontrived acts of kindness and respect toward ourself and toward others that no longer get lost in the illusory divide between inner and outer.

~Jon Kabat-Zinn

how we pay attention to what we want to forget….

inquiry for today~   maybe desire is really about how we can’t get too close to what is true……

what colors have you seen?

We would rather be ruined than changed.

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the present

And let our illusions die.

~W. H. Auden