Etsy

An online marketplace for selling and buying all things handmade!

It's like shopping at the artists market, but from your own home. I discovered the website just in time for Christmas and along with my trip to Blue Banana Market in Toronto, have managed to get almost everyone on my list home made gifts.


Every morning, when we wake up, we have twenty-four brand-new hours to live. What a precious gift! We have the capacity to live in a way that these twenty-four hours will bring peace, joy, and happiness to ourselves and others.

Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see. The Question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We don't have to travel far away to enjoy the blue sky. We don't have to leave our city or even our neighborhood to enjoy the eyes of a beautiful child. Even the air we breathe can be a source of joy.

We can smile, breathe, walk, and eat our meals in a way that allows us to be in touch with the abundance of happiness that is available. We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive at the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.

Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment. ... Thich Nhat Hanh


My Photo
Name:
Location: Toronto, Ontario


Saturday, September 03, 2005

Contemplation: Human Relationships

I am becoming increasingly aware that all our human relationships are seated on pleasure. Concurrent to pleasure of course it's playmate, pain. Pleasure being an output of thought, appears to be sought out by the recordings of the mind. Everything we desire arises from past, does it not? I consumed a wonderful meal yesterday and my mind remembers [records] this delicious meal and wants it again today. I had a prodigious experience during meditation this morning and my mind records that pleasurable feeling and seeks to experience it again. That experience gave me considerable delight and that is pleasure.

You intimidated me and abused me and lied to me and took advantage of me. These memories remain, the hurts and annoyances, the sharp words. This is the memory [knowledge] I have about you, recorded in the cells of the memory. So my relationship with you is rooted in the past. Relationships embedded in the past brings about disorder.

So I suppose the question is, how is the mind not to record at the instant of insult or praise so that it does not act with the knowledge of the past, therefore bringing disorder to the relationship? How to live a life in relationship in which the mind has never been hurt. A mind that does not get hurt is innocent. A mind that is innocent is incapable of being hurt and it will not hurt another. This is love.

Comments on "Contemplation: Human Relationships"

 

post a comment
Counters