Coming back to conscious breathing will give you a nourishing break. It will also make your mindfulness stronger, so when you want to look into your anxiety or other emotions you’ll have the calm and concentration to be able to do so.
(via dharmarainbow)
To find permanent joy, you must look in the right direction. You will not find it in any outside object. Every object will rise, stay, and then cease. You have to look somewhere else for permanent, eternal joy. Don’t attribute joy to something else, be it a person, the sun, moon, or stars.
Stop this tendency of going to outside objects, whatever they may be. Stop your mind from going in any direction outside. Then you must return to your inner beauty. That is your own nature: bliss eternal, which you have never felt.
Papaji
Today we often confuse happiness with pleasure; but pleasure is only an illusion, a shadow of happiness; and in this delusion man may pass his whole life, seeking after pleasure and never finding satisfaction. … Do you think that if these people gained their desires they would be happy? If they possessed all, would that suffice? No, they would still find some excuse for unhappiness; all these excuses are only like covers over a man’s eyes, for deep within is the yearning for the true happiness which none of these things can give. He who is really happy is happy everywhere, in a palace or in a cottage, in riches or in poverty, for he has discovered the fountain of happiness which is situated in his own heart. As long as a person has not found that fountain, nothing will give him real happiness.
This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. By remembering the past we can plan for the future. But the ability to plan for the future is offset by the “ability” to dread pain and the fear of the unknown. Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and future gives us a corresponding dim sense of the present. In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable.
(via dharmarainbow)
“Things
outside neither bind nor liberate you, only your attitude toward them.
Only when you forget and identify yourself with the body or the mind do
the clouds come and block your view of the sun. Remember, the sun is
always there; clouds come and go.”
