Benji
@benji
Benji
The Liberating Practices of Sympathetic Joy and Gratitude
tricycle.org
• Their circumstances, like mine, were not fixed; our highs and lows, successes and failures, are fluid and ever-changing.
• I believe we can all benefit from the practice of mudita to unburden our hearts and minds from everyday comparison and jealousy, and connect to more expansive, open-hearted joy.
• As the Dalai Lama said, “There are so many people in this world, it simply makes sense to make their happiness a source of our own. Then our chances of experiencing joy are enhanced 6 billion-to-one. Those are very good odds.”
• Begin by taking a few deep breaths. Feel your body on the cushion or chair and relax into your posture.
• What do I have in my life to be grateful for?
• When you’re ready, bring awareness to your heart. Feel what is present in your heart with kindness and nonjudgment.
• May your happiness and good fortune continue to grow and increase.
• May your joy not leave you.
• May you recognize and appreciate your good fortune.
The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.
James Joyce • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (AmazonClassics Edition)
“Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness.”
L. M. Sacasas • If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention
• The question of goodness permeates Murdoch’s entire body of work, but she plumbs this particular aspect of it — its bearing on truth and morality, lensed through Plato — in greater depth in an essay titled On “God” and “Good,” also included in Existentialists and Mystics.
• With an eye to the relationship between the good and “the real which is the proper object of love, and of knowledge which is freedom,” she considers what it takes for us to purify our attention in order to take in reality on its own terms, unalloyed with our attachments and ideas.
• What it takes, she suggests, is “something analogous to prayer, though it is something difficult to describe, and which the higher subtleties of the self can often falsify” — not some “quasi-religious meditative technique,” but “something which belongs to the moral life of the ordinary person.”
• Half a century after the existentialist and mystic Simone Weil liberated this raw mindfulness from the strict captivity of religion with her lovely observation that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” for it “presupposes faith and love.”
People derive a lot more happiness from high-skill activities that require learning than they do from low-skill ones that don’t, yet we typically settle for the latter. In other words, you will probably be much happier reading about philosophy or science than you will if you just scroll social media—so why are you still scrolling? The obvious... See more