Now are the rough things smooth, and the smooth things stand in flickering slats, facing the slow tarnish of sun-fall.
Summer is over, or nearly.
And therefore the green is not green anymore but yellow, beige, russet, rust; all the darknesses are beginning to settle in.
And therefore why pray to permanence, why not pray to impermanence, to change, to – whatever comes next.
Willingness is next to godliness.
Mary Oliver, prose-poem
In matters of soul,
it is advisable never to compensate or to try to escape,
but instead to tend better
the very thing that is causing trouble.
Thomas Moore, Soul Mates
What we need is to be interested and to watch, but not interfere or be caught up in what we are thinking. Don’t think of the past, don’t anticipate the future, don’t get fascinated by the present.
See it as it is. Just be there with it. A thought is just a thought. An emotion is just an emotion.
It is like a bubble. It will burst and another one will come up.
Ani Tenzin Palmo, Reflections on a Mountain Lake
A question that has intrigued me for years is this: How can we start exactly where we are, with all our entanglements, and still develop unconditional acceptance of ourselves instead of guilt and depression? One of the most helpful methods I’ve found is the practice of compassionate abiding. This is a way of bringing warmth to unwanted feelings. It is a direct method for embracing our experience rather than rejecting it. So the next time you realize that you’re hooked — that you’re stuck, finding yourself tightening, spiraling into blaming, acting out, obsessing — you could experiment with this approach.
Contacting the experience of being hooked, you breathe in, allowing the feeling completely and opening to it. The in-breath can be deep and relaxed — anything that helps you to let the feeling be there, anything that helps you not push it away. Then, still abiding with the urge and edginess of feelings such as craving or aggression, as you breathe out you relax and give the feeling space. The outbreath is not a way of sending the discomfort away but a way of ventilating it, of loosening the tension around it, of becoming aware of the space in which the discomfort is occurring.
Pema Chodron, Three Steps to Genuine Compassion
It is so tempting to want the answers before we begin the journey. We like to know the way. We like to have maps. But we are more like a breathing puzzle, a living bag of pieces, and each day shows us what a piece or two is for, where it might go, how it might fit. Over time, a picture starts to emerge by which we being to understand our place in the world. Unfortunately, we waste a lot of time seeking someone to tell us what life will be like once we live it. We drain ourselves of inner fortitude by asking others to map our way. At the end of all this stalling, though, we each have to venture out and simply see what happens.
The instructions are in the living, and I confess that of all the times that I thought I liked this or didn’t care for that, not one was of my choosing or yours. For as the Earth was begun like a dish breaking, eternity is that scene slowly reversing,and you and I, and the things we’re drawn to, are merely the pieces of God unbreaking back together.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
One or two posts these days on how to work with difficult and frightening emotions: Awareness is the key to living fully in each moment, even if the moment contains difficult emotions. It is the same practice – insofar as it is possible – to spend time with and hold emotions in a non-judgmental awareness without making them into a statement about ourselves or the direction of our lives. Gentleness, kindness and self-compassion are the key to this work, leading to a genuine friendliness toward ourselves and towards whatever passes through the body-mind.
With radical accountability, all emotions are observed as experiences only, pointing nowhere, implicating no one and signifying nothing. Though it is no one’s fault that we have an emotion, it is still essential to hold the emotion fully within awareness without wavering. Emotions need observation and allowance, not our analysis or fixation. The story that accompanies the emotion dies with accountability. The story was never true to begin with; we needed it to provide relief from the pain of being “me”. Though we did not know it at the time, sustaining the story’s untruth through inattention was causing even greater suffering than if we had allowed the pain to express itself in awareness. Radical accountability allows all experience to be itself.
Rodney Smith, Stepping out of Self-Deception
Mindfulbalance 