There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
William Stafford
The body always leads us home . . .
if we can simply learn to trust sensation
and stay with it long enough for it to reveal appropriate action, movement, insight, or feeling.
Pat Ogden
It’s helpful to remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing to whatever arises, without picking and choosing. It’s definitely not meant to repress anything, and it’s not intended to encourage grasping either… To the degree that we‘re willing to see our enmeshment or grasping and our repressing clearly, they begin to wear themselves out…. Up come all these thoughts, but rather than squelch them or obsess with them, we acknowledge them and let them fade.
Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty
Some people once brought a blind man to Jesus and asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ They all wanted to know why this terrible curse had fallen on this man. And Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.’ He told them not to look for why the suffering came but to listen for what the suffering could teach them. Jesus taught that our pain is not punishment, it is no one’s fault. When we seek to blame, we distract ourselves from an exquisite opportunity to pay attention, to see even in this pain a place of grace, a moment of spiritual promise and healing.
Wayne Muller, Legacy of the Heart
Softness means opening to whatever is there, relaxing into it. At such times try this “mantra”: “It’s Ok. Whatever it is it’s Ok, Let me feel it”. This is the softening of the mind. You can open to your experience with a sense of allowing, and simply be with whatever predominates, a pain, a thought, an emotion, anything.
Softening the mind involves two steps. First, become mindfully aware of whatever is most predominant. That is the core guideline for all insight meditation. So the first step is just to see, to open. For the second step, notice how you are relating to whatever arises….The easiest way to relax is to stop trying to make things different. Rather than try to create another space, simply allow space for whatever is going on.
Joseph Goldstein, Insight Meditation
People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. The future stands still, but we move in infinite space. How could it not be difficult for us? […]
And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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