We often find ourselves relating to people or to events through patterns inherited from our past and these prevent us from being fully open to the actual experience in front of us:
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand,
nor look through the eyes of the dead,
nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Everyone should sit firmly anchored in the place
where there is no better and worse.
Kodo Sawaki, 1880 – 1965, Japanese Sōtō Zen teacher
In practicing equanimity, we train in widening our circle of understanding and compassion to include the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. It is more a matter of being fully engaged with whatever comes to our door. We could call it being completely alive. Training in equanimity requires that we leave behind some baggage: the comfort of rejecting whole parts of our experience, for example and the security of welcoming only what is pleasant. The courage to continue with this unfolding process comes from self-compassion and from giving ourselves plenty of time. If we continue to practice this way over the months and years, we will feel our hearts and minds grow bigger. When people ask me how long this will take, I say, “At least until you die.”
Pema Chodron, The places that scare you
The Real …expects nothing of speech
Le réel …n’attend rien de la parole.
Jacques Lacan, French Psychoanalyst, Ecrits
Part of waking up is becoming sensitive to how we become discouraged, how we close down, and where we go for false comfort. To wake up is to become aware of the tendency to judge ourselves, to take our failures personally, to fall into despair, self-pity, depression, frustration, anger, or wherever we tend to go when we believe the story that we are a person who can’t do it right. Seeing all of this is enough. Awareness is its own action. We don’t need to analyze it or impose changes based on our ideas of what should be happening. Just being awake to the present moment, as it is, and seeing clearly what is happening: this is transformative. We are simply awake here and now.
Joan Tollifson, Nothing to Grasp
Suffering begins when you mentally label a situation as bad.
That causes an emotional contraction.
When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is available to you.
The contraction cuts you off from that power, the power of life itself
Eckhart Tolle
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