Mystery presents itself to us in the mode of withdrawal, of silence, of distance
so that speaking about it, if that is to make sense,
always requires listening to its silence.
Karl Rahner
Year: 2013
Re-parenting
Meditation practices are a form of spiritual reparenting. We are transforming deeply rooted patterns of inner relating by learning to bring mindfulness and compassion to our life. An open and accepting attention is radical because it flies in the face of our conditioning to assess what is happening as wrong. We are deconditioning the habit of turning against ourselves, discovering that in this moment’s experience nothing is missing or wrong.
Tara Brach, Awakening From the Trance of Unworthiness
Stopping the verbalizations
The greatest support we can have is mindfulness, which means being totally present in each moment. If the mind remains centered then it can’t make up stories about the injustice of the world or one’s friends, or about one’s desires, or one’s lamentations. All these mind-made stories would fill many volumes, but when we are mindful such verbalizations stop. “Mindful” is being fully absorbed in the moment, leaving no room for anything else. We are filled with the momentary happening, whether that may be standing or sitting or lying down, being comfortable or uncomfortable, feeling pleasant or unpleasant. Whichever it may be, it is a non-judgmental awareness, “knowing only,” without evaluation.
Ayya Khema, All of Us
photo 9jules9 of Le Silence, d’Antoine-Augustin Préault.
Making friends
Being satisfied with what we already have is a magical golden key to being alive in a full, unrestricted, and inspired way. One of the major obstacles to what is traditionally called enlightenment is resentment, feeling cheated, holding a grudge about who you are, where you are, what you are. This is why we talk so much about making friends with ourselves, because, for some reason or other, we don’t feel that kind of satisfaction in a full and complete way. Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists, exists in what we already have.
Pema Chodron, The wisdom of No Escape
Always right here
There is a foundation for our lives, a place in which our life rests. That place is nothing but the present moment, as we see, hear, experience what is. If we do not return to that place, we live our lives out of our heads. We blame others; we complain; we feel sorry for ourselves. All of these symptoms show that we’re stuck in our thoughts. We’re out of touch with the open space that is always right here.
Charlotto Joko Beck, Nothing Special
….and accepting
Both our upbringing and our culture provide the immediate breeding ground for this contemporary epidemic of feeling deficient and unworthy. Many of us have grown up with parents who gave us messages about where we fell short and how we should be different from the way we are. We were told to be special, to look a certain way, to act a certain way, to work harder, to win, to succeed, to make a difference, and not to be too demanding, shy or loud. An indirect but insidious message for many has been, “Don’t be needy.” Because our culture so values independence, self-reliance and strength, even the word needy evokes shame. To be considered as needy is utterly demeaning, contemptible. And yet, we all have needs —physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual. So the basic message is, “Your natural way of being is not okay; to be acceptable you must be different from the way you are.”
Tara Brach, Awakening From the Trance of Unworthiness
Mindfulbalance 