Month: May 2011

We will always have some contradictions within

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Sometimes we labour under the mistaken belief that happiness can only come if there are absolutely no difficulties or when everything is resolved in our life or our life history. However, we sometimes need to recognize and simply accept the different parts of our lives and the different directions we want to take, and allow that perfect integration is unlikely to be ever achieved fully in this life. We can hold these different parts and accept the different feelings that exist within us,  as we are, without demanding that they all harmonize. As the writer Mark Epstein put it so well in his excellent book,  we can be “in pieces, without falling apart”

Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysing to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them  and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which makes them trivial by comparison.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

Reach out today

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You often say “I would give, but only to the deserving” . The trees in the orchard say not so, nor the flocks in the pastures. They give that they may live,  for to withhold is to perish.

Kahlil Gibran

Developing a constancy in awareness

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It is true there is an ebb and flow

but the sea remains the sea.

Vincent van Gogh

Where you are, and not judging it

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The path is something we cultivate. We have to know where we are and not try to become something that we think we would like to be; we have to practise with the way it is now, without making a judgement about it. If you’re feeling tense, nervous, disillusioned, disappointed about yourself or whatever, then try to recognise that what is in the moment is enough. Be willing to just admit, to acknowledge the way it is,  rather than to indulge in believing that what you’re feeling is somehow an accurate description of reality, or to feel that what you are feeling is wrong and you shouldn’t be feeling like that. Those are two extremes. But the cultivation of the way is to recognise that whatever is subject to arising is subject to ceasing. And this isn’t a put-down or cold-hearted way of cultivating the path, even though it might sound like it.

Ajahn Sumedho

Letting go of the things that change

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Things change so quickly. On Friday the news was dominated by weddings and dresses, by pomp and circumstance. Yesterday we awoke to news of  death and differences,  and to the insecurity it provokes.  Such changes can make the ground we stand on feel quite uncertain. However,  it is not just change on a world level but how we deal with the smaller changes in our lives that determines our ongoing  sense of inner peace and calm. We expend quite a lot of energy each day in trying to hold on to what is familiar and in attempting to make the world conform to how we would like it to be. The problem with this – other than the futile waste of energy – is that  we limit our ability to experience joy in the present moment as it actually is. If we approach moments with fear,  rather than opening to how they are, we cannot see the richness in them.

A contrary strategy works best: Stop trying to grasp, to control the world around you or the day ahead of you. In doing so you loosen the grip of fear and  give each experience the possibility to bring its richness.   Letting go of control lets go of suffering.

It is not because of impermanence that we suffer

But because of our ideas about permanence.

Thich Nhat Hahn

The world is complex – deal with it

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It is through the messiness of our own individual histories –  and the complexity of the world  with all its divisions and differences of opinion – that we come to a full contentment in our lives, not by running away or denying parts of ourselves or what has happened in the past:

The way through the world

is more difficult to find

than the way beyond it

Wallace Stevens