Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find
all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Rumi
Month: October 2010
Getting to know you
Me
ditation, whatever method you are using, is simply getting to know your mind. It is not about meditating ‘on’ something or getting into a zone where you are blissfully removed from your mind’s contents.
Instead, the actual meaning of meditation is more like getting used to being with your own mind.
Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche
Love and fear
Happiness, anxiety, joy, resentment — we have many words for the many emotions we experience in our lifetimes. But deep down, there are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt.
We have to make a decision to be in one place or the other. If you don’t actively choose love, you will find yourself in a place of either fear or one of its component feelings.
Every moment offers the choice to choose one or the other. And we must continually make these choices, especially in difficult circumstances when our commitment to love, instead of fear, is challenged.
Elizabeth Kubler Ross
May nothing disturb you: Nada Te Turbe
Today is the feastday of Teresa of Avila, another formidable nun, this time from the 16th Century. She lived in an age of great social change, somewhat like today, and was a strong leader, founding monasteries at a time when most preferred women to be relegated to the kitchen and the home. She was intensely practical and deeply human. However she combined her achievements with a very profound interior life. She reminds us not to neglect the dimension of the soul in this age with our focus on progress and speed.
Despite suffering ill health she had a great trust that a Higher Power was guiding her life and her work. Even if she could not see where things were leading she trusted. These handwritten words were found after her death. May they support all who struggle this evening. The musical version comes from the monastery at Taize, not too far away from here in Bourgogne.
Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
Everything passes.
God does not go away.
Patience
can attain anything.
He who has God within,
does not lack anything.
Nada te turbe, nada te espante; quien a Dios tiene nada le falta.
The basic instruction
Buddhist nun Pema Chodron’s instruction on how to develop our hearts, how to work with the fears that arise when we touch our natural warmth and love.
Each of us has a “soft spot”: the place in our experience where we feel vulnerable and tender. This soft spot is inherent in appreciation and love, and it is equally inherent in pain.
Often, when we feel that soft spot, it’s quickly followed by a feeling of fear and an involuntary, habitual tendency to close down. This is the tendency of all living things: to avoid pain and cling to pleasure. In practice, however, covering up the soft spot means shutting down against out life experience. Then we tend to narrow down into a solid feeling of self against other.
The trick is to stay with the soft spot and not harden over it. That’s the basic instruction: stay with the soft spot.
How does this work? You’re going along, and your mind and heart are open. Then someone says something and you find yourself either frightened or starting to get angry. You feel the hair rising on the back of your neck, and something in you closes down. You’re on your way to becoming all worked up. At this point, you become unreasonable, and all your wisdom goes out the window. You’re hooked. This is what we work with as practitioners, we have to be able to see where we get hooked like this. It’s easy to see. To interrupt the flow of it, though, is another matter.
Pema Chödrön, Stay with the Soft Spot of Bodhichitta.
Afraid to be ourselves
All of us have a secret desire to be seen as heroes, saints, martyrs.
We are afraid to be children, to be ourselves.
Jean Vanier, Community and Growth
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