My life disABLED with Chronic Ilnnesses, it just IS. Taking one moment at a time.
I’ve decided to change things up a bit on my blog. I won’t be posting a Mindfulness Monday every Monday. I will still post once or twice a month, I’m hoping to blog more often with different topics. (health allowing) xo
Remember…
This is my favorite quotes. I hope you enjoy it, I know I’ve used it before. xo
**Image by W. Holcombe, please do not use without permission.
“Do not wait until the conditions
are perfect to begin.
Beginning makes
the conditions perfect.”
~ Alan Cohen
**************************************************************“Begin doing what you want
you want to do now.
We are not living in eternity.
We have only this moment.
sparkling like a star in
our hand and melting
like a snowflake.”
~ Marie Beynan Ray
**************************************************************
“Be mindful of how you
approach time.
Watching the clock
is not the same as
watching the sun rise.”
~ Sophia Bedford-Pierce
**************************************************************“Although no one
can go back and
make a new start,
anyone can start
from now and make
a brand new ending.”
~Carl Bard
**I hope everyone finds more joy, health, love, and compassion in the upcoming year. I know it’s been a hard one for many of us. Just a few quotes to share today, more words from Wendy coming soon. 😉
“Calm the winds of your thoughts, and there will be no waves on the ocean of your mind.”
Remez Sassoon
“Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet, it is a way of entering into the quiet that is already there – buried under the 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day.”
Deepak Chopra
“Empty your mind of everything – let the mind become still.”
Lao Tzu
I create personalized “mindfulness” or “grounding” cards. On different coloured index cards, I print out a quote; a saying; a thought gleaned from elsewhere, or sometimes from somewhere inside me.
I carry two with me . . . always.
The first is a grounding exercise to use when I have a panxiety attack, feel like I’m drifting too far from shore, or to help be mindful of my surroundings by using all my senses. *
The other:
“Calm as a koi pond.”
Lorraine
* Borrowed from the “web of thoughts.” Can be modified to suit a person’s abilities and needs; I took the whole.
Look around you and find:
FIVE things you can SEE
FOUR things you can TOUCH
THREE things you can HEAR
TWO things you can SMELL
ONE thing you can TASTE
And, Wendy (who is taking a break from Mindfulness Monday today) gave me a wonderful set of 65 Power Thought Cards, beautifully written and richly, colorfully, and playfully illustrated by Louise Hay.
On one side is a saying; the reverse is a longer meditation on that specific thought/phrase/concept.
I carry around two:
“I am willing to change.”
“I express my creativity.”
Thanks to Wendy, (and Mindfulness Mondays), I am “working” on both!
image: © lorraine
Today I searched for quotes to help me simply accept life has it is right now, and change my thought process about it all. I promised someone recently, “Don’t worry I won’t let her steal my joy”, but by the time I said that, I realize I had already allowed that to happen.
The serenity prayer states, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.” My biggest problem right now is that I don’t feel I have the wisdom to know the difference. I’m spinning my wheels trying to figure out what I can change, and if I can’t change things, how can I just accept that? What blessing do I find in it? The greatest comfort I have right now is knowing that everything changes. This is just a blip in my life, it will change…..right?? Please tell me it will change. Between the stress in my personal life and the stress of politics right now, I just feel overwhelmed.
The holidays are coming up. I was really looking forward to having the holidays with family, but it is way too complicated for me. I’m ready to run away and hide for the next couple of months. Anyone want to come with?
*photo by W. Holcombe, all rights reserved. October Sunset in Tucson.
When I am in need of comfort, and have a desire for knowledge, I often turn to the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. His words resonate with me and make me feel understood. I hope you find his words as compelling as I do. (Thich Nhat Hanh is often referred to as Thầy, meaning Teacher, throughout this post I will also refer to him as Thầy)
Below you will find quotes by from his book Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm. with comments by me on how these quotes reflect my life right now and help give me peace.
During the past week I have been having vertigo again, even though I’m feeling much better now, the fear of the possibility that things could get worse has been creeping up. My first instinct is to run from this fear, or push it down and refuse its validity. After reading this quote I realized how much I have been trying to escape from my fear, I now understand that I need to investigate it’s cause and think about it rationally.
Thầy really hit the nail on the head with this one. For the sake of this post I will only talk about what has presently caused me to replay old events – a vertigo attack. My automatic response to this attack was a flash back to my worst days experiencing vertigo. The many days where I could do nothing but watch the world spin were suddenly replaying themselves in my mind. It is refreshing to know that I have another choice. I can take this attack as it is, a singular event, it is not part of my past (well it is now…hopefully you get what I’m saying). What happened this week was new, yes I’ve had thousands of vertigo attacks, but this was a different one, it was not one that I had already experienced, it was new. It’s time to let the past go, to look at that time with compassion, especially for myself.
How liberating this quote is! I often feel that everything in my life is out of my control, that I am powerless. I lost so much of my independence and then got some back, the vertigo attack brought back all the times that I was so dependent on others for everything. It’s that loss of control (power) that scares me. Thầy teaches that we always have power over our fear, yes we will always feel fear, but if we look closely at our fears and really get to the root of it, we can then see that our fear does not control us, we control it.
I hope you enjoyed this variation on Mindfulness Monday, if it is well received I may do this type of post more often.
*photo by W. Holcombe – night sky…yes it really is the moon..in Tucson. Please do not use without permission. All rights reserved. ©
“For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“When you are caught in the heavy rains of anger, open the umbrella of the mind, [and] take refuge under the roof of reason!”
Mehmet Murat Ildan
“Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”
Buddha
As Wendy indicated in her recent post, “Out of Touch”, she is having “technical difficulties.”
I find myself often full of anger, “righteous” or otherwise, thus another self-therapeutic Mindfulness Monday.
And remember:
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
John Milton
image: (c) Lorraine (please do not use without permission)
“Do not lose yourself in the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. Do not get caught in your anger, worries or fears.Come back to the present moment, and touch life deeply. This is mindfulness.”
Thich Njat Hanh
“The day you stop worrying will be the first day of your new life; anxiety takes you in circles, trust in yourself and become free.”
Leon Brown
“Don’t believe every worried thought you have. Worried thoughts are notoriously inaccurate.”
Renee Jain
As Wendy indicated, I will drop by from time to time to do the Mindfulness Monday post.
Finding mindfulness quotes concerning worry was an excellent therapeutic exercise.
As an added bonus because I really like the idea:
“Worry is a misuse of your imagination.”
Curiano
Image: © Lorraine (Please do not use without permission)
I’m thrilled to announce that Lorraine has agreed be a regular contributor to Mindfulness Monday. She has been so amazing filling in for me on the many days when I just didn’t feel like I could look at the computer; and, I think you’ll all agree, she has done an awesome job. I hope you will welcome her and continue to enjoy the quotes and photos she shares with us.
Don’t worry, I’m not giving up my blog, or Mindfulness Monday. It is my hope that I will be able to focus on more in depth posts again, and I will still contribute to Mindfulness Monday as I increase my mindfulness practice.
*self portrait by W. Holcombe. My many faces of self.
“For me mindfulness is like building a house,
so, the next time the tsunami
that depression is comes,
I’ll have a structure to resist it.”
Ruby Wax
“Regardless of how dark and downbeat
the places you may find yourself,
there always exists the potential
for another path.”
Richard Gilpin
“You don’t have to control
your thoughts.
You just have to let them
stop controlling you.”
David Millman
Image: © Lorraine (filling in for Wendy; using the theme she had chosen)
“Gardening is an active
participation in the
deepest mysteries of
the universe.”
~ Thomas Berry
“Look deep into nature
and then you will
understand everything better.”
~ Albert Einstein
“Gardening simply does not allow
one to be mentally old, because
too many hopes and dreams
are yet to be realized.”
~Allan Armitage
*Photo taken at Tucson Botanical Garden, Tucson AZ, by W. Holcombe, all rights reserved. Please do not use without permission.
