Philosophy 03 (May 24 - Dec 25)

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A Refuge of Your Own

What an extraordinary privilege to know that you have within you a refuge that nobody can ever touch. Nobody can take it away from you.

- Helen Tworkov, “A Refuge That No One Can Touch”

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Turn Over the Reins

When the mind relaxes its grip, the body leads the way.

It’s a great relief for the mind, in fact.

- Willa Blythe Baker, “The Body Is Already Mindful”

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Happiness Is Happiness

Whether you achieve something spectacular and then feel happy or you just feel happy because you’re listening to your favorite music, the quality of your mind is the same.

- Haemin Sunim, “Finding Happiness by No Longer Looking for It”

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A Stream of Mindfulness

If you accelerate your efforts, if your awareness is continuous, your mindfulness will become full.

Both by day and by night, it’ll keep staying full like that. It becomes a stream of water.

- Ajahn Chah, “Make Your Practice a Continuous Stream”

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Enlightenment Isn’t Hardline

You don’t need to drill a hole in your head in order to get enlightened. You can hold several ideas in your mind that are contradictory without freaking out—Keats’s negative capability.

Allen Ginsberg, “Spontaneous Intelligence”

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Embracing All of Ourselves

Peace and kindness have their best shot at establishing themselves when we accept our own inadequacy, when limitation and error become aspects of ourselves we can embrace, rather than strive to mask.

- Henry Shukman, “The Art of Being Wrong”

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Freedom Is the Suchness

There is no beginning. There is no end.

No person can give you freedom.

Freedom is the suchness of life; all gets swept away except for the deathless nature of tathata (the ultimate nature of all things). This is enlightenment. This is true liberation.

- Felicia Washington Sy, On ‘Down by the Riverside’

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Stop Worrying

One of the approaches that I personally find useful is to cultivate the thought: If the situation or problem is such that it can be remedied, then there is no need to worry about it.

In other words, if there is a solution or a way out of the difficulty, you do not need to be overwhelmed by it.

The appropriate action is to seek its solution.

The Dalai Lama, “Countering Stress and Depression”

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Accept Yourself

We may think meditation will improve us but it’s really about accepting ourselves as we are right now.

- Pema Chödrön, “We Can Still Be Crazy”

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Clean Your Mirror

Remember that life is like a mirror: Everything you perceive reflects your inner world. Cleaning your dirty mirror of distorting smudges means clearing self-deception and coming closer to the truth.

- Khangser, “Your Life Is a Mirror”