Rob Tourtelot
@rtourtelot
Rob Tourtelot
Here are some rules of thumb that might help you navigate whatever practice you are trying out.
- Criticizing, judging, or assessing yourself isn’t virtue. It doesn’t help in meditation; it’s just more noise. And if you are criticizing, judging, or assessing yourself, don’t criticize that, and so on, until you wear out and compassion enters.
- Criticizin
John Tarrant • John Tarrant : Articles
We suffer as human beings, but out of that can come enormous joys, and genuine happiness, too. It can run in tandem with this ordinary sense of suffering. Otherwise, joy doesn’t resonate fully. Joy seems to leap forth out of suffering. Regardless of your loss, you see how beautiful, how meaningful, how joyful the world can suddenly be. Human beings... See more
Amanda Petrusich • Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life
That is all we have, this moment with the world. It will not last, because nothing lasts. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and no matter how much we find along the way, life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees... See more
Maria Popova • Losing Love, Finding Love, and Living with the Fragility of It All
Little things don’t have big signs on them
At sixteen, Mike Nichols’s girlfriend’s parents gave him tickets to a Broadway play that turned out to redirect the course of his life. In college, a chance interaction with a cafeteria busboy led to him attending weekly improv workshops, where he soaked up practices and principles of creativity and
I think in a lot of these Eastern systems, the delusion is that we’re trapped inside this little machine that thinks it’s central, and permanent, and all-important and is always thinking it’s about its little victory narrative. But when you step out of it for a second, you see that it’s just a temporary construction of neurology, or karma, or... See more
Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews George Saunders (Published 2021)
Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other."
We need to let it go, let our life flow through our hands like a river and not try to grab some piece of it and hold on to it. Just to be present with it and find out how to express our vow in this moment, in this circumstance, right where we are right now, instead of trying to figure out how to make it the way we want so that it’ll be just what we
... See moreZenju Earthlyn Manuel • Seeds for a Boundless Life: Zen Teachings from the Heart
Navigating mystery humbles us, reminds us with every step that we don’t know everything, are not, in fact, the masters of all.
Martin Shaw • Navigating the Mysteries
Sometimes we are not really lost; we already have what we need, but we haven’t noticed. Eventually a tenderness opens in us and we start to change. It doesn’t matter if it happens after long years of struggle or if it happens quickly. We just have to be grateful when it comes.