Tag: mandala

Equanimity’s strength derives from a combination of understanding and trust. It is based on understanding that the conflict and frustration we feel when we cannot control the world doesn’t come from our inability to do so, but rather from the fact that we are trying to control the uncontrollable. We know better than to try and prevent the seasons from changing or the tide from coming in. Following autumn, winter comes. We may not prefer it, but we trust it because we can understand and accept its rightful place in the larger cycle, a bigger picture. Can we apply the same wise balance to the cycles and tides of pleasant, unpleasant and neutral experiences in our lives?

Sharon Salzburg

Compassion prevents love and sympathetic joy from turning into states of self-satisfied complacency with a jealously-guarded petty happiness. Compassion stirs and urges love to widen its sphere; it stirs and urges sympathetic joy to search for fresh nourishment. Thus it helps both of them to grow into boundless states.

Nyanaponika Thera

In a way there is only one Brahma Vihara and it’s the Metta Bhavana, but when you, with your metta, happen  to come into contact with pain and suffering, the metta automatically, or rather spontaneously, becomes transformed into Karuna.  When it comes into contact with the joy of others, it automatically becomes transformed into sympathetic joy. And similarly when your metta is extended equally towards all there is equanimity. So YOU look after metta and the other three will look after themselves.  You don’t have to think about them. They depend on circumstances.

Sangharakshita

I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding

John O'Donohue