Everyone has an Everest. Whether it’s a climb you chose, or a circumstance you find yourself in, you’re in the middle of an important journey. Can you imagine a climber scaling the wall of ice at Everest’s Lhotse face and saying, “This is such a hassle”? Or spending the first night in the mountain’s “death zone” and thinking, “I don’t need this stress”? Continue reading
Author: onetusk
Book Recommendation: Mindfulness in Plain English: 20th Anniversary Edition by Henepola Gunaratana
Mindfulness in Plain English Quotes
“The irony of it is that real peace comes only when you stop chasing it—another Catch-22.”
“Patience is the key. Patience. If you learn nothing else from meditation, you will learn patience. Patience is essential for any profound change.”
“Buddhism advises you not to implant feelings that you don’t really have or avoid feelings that you do have. If you are miserable you are miserable; that is the reality, that is what is happening, so confront that. Look it square in the eye without flinching. When you are having a bad time, examine that experience, observe it mindfully, study the phenomenon and learn its mechanics. The way out of a trap is to study the trap itself, learn how it is built. You do this by taking the thing apart piece by piece. The trap can’t trap you if it has been taken to pieces. The result is freedom.”
“Pain is inevitable, suffering is not.”
Reviews
“A masterpiece.” (Jon Kabat-Zinn)
“A classic–one of the very best English sources for authoritative explanations of mindfulness.” (Daniel Goleman)
“Of great value to newcomers… especially people without access to a teacher.” (Larry Rosenberg, author of Breath by Breath)
“This book is the bible of mindfulness.” (Barry Boyce, editor of Mindful magazine and The Mindfulness Revolution)
“Wonderfully clear and straightforward.” (Joseph Goldstein, author of A Heart Full of Peace)
“Pithy and practical.” (Shambhala Sun)
“Jargon-free.” (USA Today)
An excellent book, clearly written, well-organized, and comprehensive. It describes a method by which you achieve meaningful meditation, including many helpful suggestions and descriptions of variations like walking meditation. It lists the many things that may occur as one meditates and suggests methods for dealing with each of these hindrances, treating most of them as useful objects for unattached observation. The reader is warned not to expect quick returns from meditation, but extols the benefits one can achieve from patience and practice. This is Vipassana meditation, which stresses concentration and mindfulness, living in the moment. If fully successful, it amounts to auto-psychoanalysis, discovering the deepest parts of oneself, good and bad, without judgment, allowing one to develop relationships of “loving friendliness” with others and enjoying a life lived in the moment.
– David N.Orth
Book Recommendation – Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames by Thich Nhat Hanh
“When we get angry, we suffer. If you really understand that, you also will be able to understand that when the other person is angry, it means that she is suffering. When someone insults you or behaves violently towards you, you have to be intelligent enough to see that the person suffers from his own violence and anger. But we tend to forget. We think that we are the only one that suffers, and the other person is our oppressor. This is enough to make anger arise, and to strengthen our desire to punish. We want to punish the other person because we suffer. Then, we have anger in us; we have violence in us, just as they do. When we see that our suffering and anger are no different from their suffering and anger, we will behave more compassionately. So understanding the other is understanding yourself, and understanding yourself is understanding the other person. Everything must begin with you.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger
Many of us still have a wounded child alive within us….
“Many of us still have a wounded child alive within us. Our wounds may have been caused by our father or our mother. Our father may have been wounded when he was a child. Our mother may have been wounded as a little girl, too. Continue reading
Thought for the Week – 16th October 2017
“It isn’t the changes that do you in, it’s the transitions.
Change is situational, transition is the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation.
Change is external, transition is internal.”
~ William Bridges
Change Your Brain , Change Your Life
( Contributed by Dr. R Thavasothy)
When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive….
“As our studies have suggested, the phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components. When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following.
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Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence
The fruit we were meant to cultivate
……I began to realize that maybe anger is the real problem here. Don’t get me wrong I think our country has some serious issues that we need to address. There are times when I think we should be outraged, but I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the emotional energy to be mad all the time at everything that is going on in the world that I don’t like. I am tired of society telling me that I need to be constantly offended and constantly mad all the time. I am not going to invest what little energy I have left at the end of the day into cultivating anger. I want us to be able to actually take some corrective action on some of the serious problems in our society, but we will never be able to address them or do anything constructive about them until we get over our obsession, our addiction to being angry and outraged all the time. This is the state of our country right now: we are addicted to being outraged. We will look for it. We will parse everything someone says to see if they might have possibly made a misstatement and then we will pounce on it, drag that person down, destroy them in any way that we can and then go on, proud of ourselves at doing a righteous deed. We are angry and we are proud of our anger because it makes us feel righteous. We don’t know how to find that righteous feeling anywhere else so we find it in anger. As long as we can keep feeling angry at someone or something, we can keep feeling righteous about ourselves and our way of life. We don’t have to really look at ourselves as long as we can stay focused on how wrong someone else is……
Access full post and audio: The fruit we were meant to cultivate
Recall the meaning of your work – Why am I here?
In all types of organizations, too many filled with people exhausted, cynical, and burned-out, I have witnessed the incredible levels of energy and passion that can be evoked when leaders or colleagues take the time to recall people to the meaning of their work. It only takes a simple but powerful question: “What called you here? What were you dreaming you might accomplish when you first came to work here?” Continue reading
ONE TUSK 