Right Here

“It is very helpful to realize that being here, sitting in meditation, doing simple everyday things like working, walking outside, talking with people, bathing, using the toilet, and eating, is actually all that we need to be fully awake, fully alive, fully human. It’s also helpful to realize that this body that we have, and this mind that we have at this very moment, are exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, and fully alive.

Furthermore, the emotions we have right now, the negativity and the positivity, are what we exactly need. One of the major obstacles to what is traditionally called enlightenment is resentment, feeling cheated, holding a grudge about who you are, where you are, what you are.”

~ Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape

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“In a certain sense, enlightenment is dying into the ordinary, or into an extraordinary ordinariness. We start to realize the ordinary is extraordinary. It’s almost like catching onto a hidden secret—that all along we were in the promised land, all along we were in the kingdom of heaven. From the very beginning, there was only nirvana, as the Buddha would say. But we were misperceiving things. By believing the images in the mind, by contracting through fear, hesitation, and doubt, we misperceived where we were. We didn’t realize we were in heaven; we didn’t realize we were in the promised land. We didn’t realize that nirvana is right here, right now, exactly where we are.”

~ Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

Photo ~ Downtown Stanwood, WA