Effortlessness is the ability to slow down and listen for the spaces between the joints... Deep within all things there is a natural rhythm, a music of opening and closing, expansion and contraction.
Interpretation
Effortlessness involves embracing a natural rhythm in life, allowing us to be more in tune with our surroundings.
This quote emphasizes the importance of slowing down to appreciate the subtle dynamics of nature and life. It suggests that true effortlessness comes from being aware of the inherent rhythms that govern our experiences, allowing us to navigate life with grace and ease rather than forcefulness.
In practice
In a meditation workshop, sharing this quote can encourage participants to embrace mindfulness.
The greatest barrier to own own healing is not the pain, sorrow or violence inflicted upon us as children. Our greatest hindrance is our ongoing capacity to judge, to criticize, and to bring tremendous harm to ourselves. If we can harden our heart against ourselves and meet our most tender feelings with anger and condemnation, we simultaneously armor our heart against the possibility of gentleness, love and healing.
Some of us have a hard time believing that we are actually able to face our own pain. We have convinced ourselves that our pain is too deep, too frightening, something to avoid at all costs. Yet if we finally allow ourselves to feel the depth of that sadness and gently let it break our hearts, we may come to feel a great freedom, a genuine sense of release and peace, because we have finally stopped running away from ourselves and from the pain that lives within us.
The heart of most spiritual practices is simply this: Remember who you are. Remember what you love. Remember what is sacred. Remember what is true. Remember that you will die and that this day is a gift. Remember how you wish to live.
Meditation helps me feel the shape, the texture of my inner life. Here, in the quiet, I can begin to taste what Buddhists would call my true nature, what Jews call the still, small voice, what Christians call the holy spirit.
If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath— our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us.
Every single choice we make, no matter how small, is the ground where who we are meets what is in the world. And the fruits of that essential relationship- the intimate, fertile conversation between our own heart's wisdom and the way the world has emerged before us- becomes a lifelong practice of deep and sacred listening for the next right thing we are required to do. We make the only choice that feels authentic and honest, necessary and true in that moment.
Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.
Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.
One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.
Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
The song and the drumming were like this: Behold, a sacred voice is calling you; All over the sky a sacred voice is calling.
Some critics are stimulating in that they make you realise how you could do better, and those are valued.
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